Current membership offerings are not giving our client any competitive advantage

Rethinking financial services membership

A colleague and I - both working as design researchers - conducted 3 months of generative and evaluative research for our client, a Christian financial services not-for-profit organization.

What if we could combine a focus on solving financial to-dos and a desire to do good. Could this be the basis for an attractive financial services membership program?

Context

The client, with sights set on attracting a new type of customer base, wanted us to explore the organization’s long standing membership program. We learned from previous rounds of generative research that the client's current membership offerings were insufficient to give the client a competitive edge with new potential customers.

"For me" refers to the products that customers are seeking to address a specific need. "For others" refers to the desire to help through donations and volunteering.

We also learned enough to come up with a new membership concept, which would combine two key insights:
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1. Prospective customers start a new relationship with a financial services company first and foremost to address a specific item on a mental checklist. Said another way, a new relationship is almost definitely going to begin through the purchase of a product to address that specific need. (This is the "for me" part of the concept.)
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2. Prospective customers, predominantly Christians, feel driven to help others. For many, our client's non-profit mission was an important differentiator in the financial services world. (This is the "for others" part of the concept).

What might we find at the intersection of these two concepts?

We wanted to test a membership concept that combined these findings: a concept that is product-centric (for me) and drives positive impact on a local scale (for others).

Process

Aiming to learn

Before jumping into prototyping the new concept, I always want to pause and ask myself and the team a few questions, most importantly: what exactly do we want to learn? The learnings objectives are those typical in any desirability test, but specifically:

- How do prospective customers respond to these "for me/for others" product concepts? What questions and/or objections arise to these ideas?

- How do current customers respond? Do they see these products as congruous with the company's mission and values? And if they do, what does that mean to them?
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Creating the stimuli

I created a prototype designed to resemble a small website. On the landing page, a user sees an overview of the company and their services (the who), the company's mission and values (signaling key differentiators), then the membership-associated products (the what).

My colleague on the project and I worked with our client's team to come up with "for me/for others" product concepts. You can view the entire desktop prototype here.
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In the prototype that I designed, these were the options that participants could view and click into to learn more.

This is the first portion of the page participants would see if they chose to learn more about the student loan offering.

This is the first portion of the page participants would see if they chose to learn more about the home loan offering.

Testing

For the test, we aimed to talk to 6-8 prospective customers and 6-8 current customers. These tests took place in Zoom video sessions and lasted about an hour each, during which my colleague and I asked the participants to explore the prototype and verbalize their internal reactions. When participants arrived at the "for me/for others" product concepts in the prototype, we asked them to choose the concept(s) that they wanted to learn more about, and explore those products in further depth on the product detail pages.

Learnings

A few of the biggest takeaways from this round of testing:

1. For potential customers, they saw these concepts as new, exciting, and highly differentiated. In the many rounds of research I have conducted with this client, I have never before heard interviewees be this excited about our client our their products.

2. Not only were the products themselves highly desirable, but they cast a halo effect on our client as a whole. These products acted as evidence that our client was truly "walking the walk," and in other words doing what is expected of them as a Christian not-for-profit.

3. While both segments excited by these concepts, they weren't excited enough to get themselves into a bad deal. For the home loan product for example, current and prospective customers expected interest rates to be the same or at least very close to market rates (and otherwise, they would not truly consider the loan). On the other hand, for investment products, current and prospective customers were much more willing to receive less returns personally if they felt their money was helping someone else who needed it.

One final learning: We were surprised to uncover that parents had a special interest in the investment products that we showed them. They saw these as tools for helping their children learn more about both charitable giving and investing. Our client was on the lookout for opportunities to help their customers engage their children in conversations about financial wellness. This was a clue that "for me/for others" could help our client advance in this area.