The Consumer Banking Customer Interview That Left Me Humbled

Or, more accurately, the last day that I brought my arrogance to the product.

Customer interviews are very important when prioritizing features of a product and would, ideally, be an “always on” activity for any product team. The purpose of this particular interview session was to understand what was most important for the customer when choosing a new lending product.

The users that were being interviewed in the session were people that either currently or recently had a personal loan that was not a mortgage, car loan or student loan. The individuals in the study skewed lower income, with lower education and were over-indexed POC, which matched well with our actual, current customer based.The users were provided with a list of seven different features or concepts and they were asked to rank them in order of importance. The seven features, unranked, are as follows:

· Good customer service

· Strong company brand name

· Low interest rate

· No fees

· Speed of access to money

· The ability to set up autopay

· Easy to navigate website/ application