Situation
The main experience for the T. Rowe Price Individual Investor had not been updated since 2004. After 13 years, even the most luddite legacy investors were starting to expect more from their digital tools. The need was apparent to revisit the investor experience in order to maintain clients and their satisfaction, but as the firm pivoted toward acquiring new clients positioning the investor experience as a differentiation became even more vital.
Task
How might we reimagine the investor experience to create a space that feels like an upgraded home to legacy clients and an impactful differentiator for acquiring new clients, all while increasing inflows and lowering call volumes, processing errors, and wrong tickets.
Action
Empowered to reimagine the experience, a core team of three (myself as content strategist, a design lead and a senior experience designer) starting with foundational design thinking workshops to understand the client journey, pain points, and create empathy mapping. We co-created and tested designs in front of both clients and the public for design efficiency and copy efficacy. Special consideration was given to make the copy approachable and understandable to the everyday investor, to simplify the merging of multiple account types and funds, and give the client a better understanding of their actual portfolio.
Result
Given we had anticipated a degree of “Who moved my cheese?” among existing clients, extra time was spent on the change management and beta release of the dashboard and flows. As that initial rollout was gated and measured, no loss of performance or increased abandonment was noted.
One unexpected outcome was an increase in phone calls. Not because of confusion or errors, but rather by providing clients with better clarity into their portfolios and the options available to them, clients were calling in at a greater rate to adjust their holdings or place orders. This spawned a recognition that other areas of content needed to be more robust to keep those calls from migrating from the digital channel.
We found that clients were not only more interested in their holdings, but more likely to place orders at a higher frequency with higher average amounts. We saw an increased average investment of $700 dollars with no dip in frequency, and flow abandonment rates dropped on the buy flow from 60% to 25%.
Below: The Account Access Homepage, example screens detailing levels of micropy for the Buy Flow (desktop and mobile), and the ideation workshop used for Waves 2 and 3 covering Sell and Exchange flows.
