Reshaping the Fintech Customer Experience
Principal UX Designer at Capital One
The Problem
Across Capital One's Consumer Bank, product teams were building customer service tools quickly and in parallel, but without a shared view of how those tools impacted associates or customers across channels. The result was a fragmented service experience: associates were juggling overlapping tools to answer a single customer inquiry, and downstream effects of one team's decisions were rarely visible to the teams whose work depended on them.
The "customer first" intent was there. The structural visibility to act on it wasn't.
The Approach
I led a team of two other researchers in a service design initiative to map the end-to-end Customer Service Associate experience and use those findings to anchor a 1-3 year product strategy. The work combined three research streams running in parallel.
Ethnographic field research. My team visited three call centers, multiple bank branches, and Capital One Cafés across eight US cities to get a representation of different major regions. At each location, we observed Customer Service Associates working with customers in real time, watching for the patterns the data alone wouldn't surface, which tools they relied on, where workflows broke down, where customer frustration spiked, and where associates had quietly built workarounds to make difficult tools usable. The workarounds turned out to be some of the richest signal in the study: each one was evidence of a problem the associate had already solved, but that the underlying tools hadn't.
1:1 associate interviews. I co-facilitated 5-7 interviews at each site, going deeper on the process issues and bottlenecks the field observations surfaced. These conversations revealed how associates were thinking about the work, not just what they were doing, which is what made the findings useful for strategy rather than just tooling fixes.
Stakeholder interviews and workshops. Together with another service designer, I ran a parallel track inside the Consumer Bank organization on two fronts. The first gathered input on short-term initiatives and longer-term strategic direction, so the research findings could be calibrated against business priorities from the start. The second was a workshop series mapping the full landscape of associate tools and systems, making the technological infrastructure visible to teams who hadn't seen it as a whole before.
Process design choices that mattered. A few decisions made the project work at this scale:
I had a dedicated note-taker in every interview so synthesis could happen in real time, which significantly reduced the time from final interview to final report.
I established a Slack channel for stakeholders and partners to "ride along" with updates throughout the project, keeping the work visible without adding meeting overhead.
I ran monthly stakeholder share-outs with dedicated Q&A, so findings landed progressively rather than in a single end-of-project reveal.
The Impact
The research synthesized into a product strategy grounded in evidence from the front line. Three concrete outcomes:
Anchored a 1-3 year Consumer Bank product strategy. Findings shaped both the near-term roadmap and the longer-range vision for the associate experience, aligning teams that had previously been building in parallel.
Made the full tool landscape visible across the organization. The system-mapping workshops gave product, design, and engineering partners a shared view of associate tooling that hadn't existed before — changing how teams scoped new work.
Surfaced associate-built workarounds as a strategic input. The workarounds we documented became evidence of unmet needs the existing tools weren't addressing, feeding directly into prioritization conversations.
What I Took Away
A few things from this project I bring to every role:
The workaround is the insight. When users build their own solutions, they're showing you exactly where your tools are failing them. That signal is worth more than a survey response.
Synthesis can't wait until the end. Real-time note-taking and monthly share-outs meant the organization was absorbing findings as we went, not waiting on a final deck. That's why the work translated into strategy.
Service design surfaces what product teams can't see alone. When teams build in parallel without a shared view of the system, customer experience suffers downstream — even when every individual decision was made in good faith. Mapping the whole made the parts solvable.