While in the process of redesigning many of the legacy tools offered across schwab.com, the Digital Self-Service product team called on me to redesign the Corporate Actions experience.  Wrought with esoteric messaging and an antiquated user flow, I began digging in to see how this experience might be reimagined.

(For clarity, a corporate action is any activity that brings material change to an organization and impacts its stakeholders. Corporate actions can range from pressing financial matters, such as bankruptcy or liquidation, to a firm changing its name or trading symbol.)

We kicked off the project with a journey-mapping session to discover what the existing customer journey looked like. The key insight gained was that customers typically don't understand what a corporate action is or how they should respond.

Key discoveries:

•  Customer Service receives more than 12,000 calls per month from customers with questions regarding corporate actions.

• The typical customer calls in three times and spends 30 minutes per call on hold.

• #1 question, "Why did I receive this letter?"

• Operations is fragmented and lacks a centralized dashboard to understand where the customer is in their journey.

• Communication with clients is inefficient, belabored and repetitive

REIMAGINING THE ECOSYSTEM

Once we discovered the inefficiencies in the existing framework, we began to reimagine the ecosystem as a whole and how each part could be improved upon and work together seamlessly within that ecosystem.

Points of emphasis:

• Create a central point of contact for the customer that also provides up-to-date intelligence for the operations team.

• Improve the messaging so it's purposeful, timely and user-friendly.

• Provide inline tools that help the customer make informed decisions independently.