2. Discovering the Brazilian behavior for collateralized loans
Source: Creditas archive
How might we empower a FinTech to educate and engage Brazilians about a credit product they fear?
Company: Creditas - Brazil - 2017
Role: Product Design Leader (employee)
CONTEXT
More than 60% of the loans in Brazil are of exceptionally high-interest rates, varying from 7% to 20% per month. Nonetheless, Brazilian families own 75% of the 55 million houses in the country, and only 30% of these families have a mortgage. This leaves 30 million houses with 100% equity - roughly 100 million people who have a substantial asset that can be used as collateral for low-interest loans.
By popularizing equity loans, Creditas launched a new product in the Brazilian market, becoming one of the largest Fintechs in LatAm and providing loans with interest rates as low as 0.99% per month. Their focus is to educate Brazilians about collateralized loans and reduce their fear of losing their homes.
Source: Unsplash - Tom Rumble
CHALLENGE
Selling home equity loans in Brazil is challenging. Customers lack financial education; they feel that getting a loan is a personal failure and are afraid of losing their homes. Home equity is a new concept and product for Brazilians, and the market still lacks critical knowledge about customer behavior for designing business strategies.
KEY QUESTIONS
What are the current personas, their needs, and moments of frustration and satisfaction through their journeys?
How do they discover Creditas, and what is their decision-making process regarding the product?
How can we best tailor our communication to address their concerns?
What makes customers give up or get rejected during the process, and how can we foresee and prevent it?
How can we streamline the process to become more agile, with fewer errors, causing customers to return?
Mural representation of the identified personas. Similar murals were placed on the Customer Support office walls to remind employees of who they are serving.
★ I implemented the posters throughout the company as a way to increase awareness about the personas.
GOALS
The Design goal at Creditas was to help the company create better customer experiences. We served four internal teams with specific needs and a limited understanding of customers since this is a new product in Brazil. In a multidisciplinary approach, I implemented a design methodology for user research. The goals for each team were:
1. Growth and branding team
Define customer segments, how to connect with them, and which value propositions most interest them.
2. Marketing and analytics team
Identify the most relevant KPIs of customer engagement to monitor their behavior throughout the acquisition and retention funnel.
3. Customer service team
Establish service playbooks, tailor the sales pitch to each customer profile, ensuring a positive experience and stronger customer relationship.
4. Product and technology team
Define the product specifications for different customer needs and identify their moments of frustration and satisfaction along the journey.
★ MY ROLE
Lead Designer
Defined and implemented the design research methodology.
Trained the four teams with design thinking workshops.
Led two designers and two representatives from each team, guided them on the user research and validated the results with leadership.
Design Process Diagram
After hearing 45 calls, we grouped the clients and I led workshops with the salesforce to validate and define the proto-personas.
From the research and workshops, we started to define the user journeys for each persona. I guided the journeys' definitions.
An initial variables map for each persona. Together with the Data Science team, I weighed all variables in our database that helped find the personas.
At the final rounds of personas definition, we invited all stakeholders and teams to validate the result and test it in operation. I coordinated these validations.
DELIVERABLES
We discovered six personas, their user journeys, and their decision-making process. This helped the Growth team to segment use cases and build tailored flows for acquiring new customers. For the Operations team, I designed playbooks for each persona based on their behavior and fears. For the Product team, I highlighted the frustration and satisfaction drivers, guiding the decisions to prioritize the product development backlog to what generates more value for customers and build a platform that adapts to different user needs.
Insights discovered for growth and marketing
The customer's decision-making journey to consider a collateralized loan.
Why the customers need a collateralized loan and how they emotionally connect to this need.
Where to find these customers online and offline.
Which brands influence our target customers.
Their specific online and financial habits.
Their fears and dreams.
The other products they consider instead of Creditas'.
Definition of the key selling points for each persona.
Persona card for the Marketing team - it shows how to communicate and where to find each persona. It presents their motivations, emotions, and behavior about credit. For the Marketing team, it became a powerful tool, making it tangible how to attract and retain customers.
★ I designed the card and validated the content.
(Zoom in to see the Marketing Persona Card Details)
Insights discovered for customer service
The customer's behavior and emotional models.
The meaning of success for each profile and metrics.
What makes customers have a change of heart.
Maturity of their financial knowledge.
Their behavior towards bureaucracy.
How to deal with their main objections.
Persona card for the Operations team shows the behavior characteristics and provides tips on dealing with the client.︎ For the attendants, it was an innovative way to think about the customer. They felt empowered by the guidelines provided in the card, which helped them streamline and improve their relationship with customers.
★ ︎I designed the card and validated the content.
Insights discovered for the user journeys
How each type of customer behaves throughout their service journey, goals, and needs.
The moments of truth, frustration, and satisfaction.
The service specifications that best serve them.
How to adapt the product interaction for each profile and improve the conversion rate.
How to make the platform support the analysts to attend to each customer profile better.
The definition of design KPIs.
(Zoom in to see the detailed Persona User Journey)
Commercial Impact
The Marketing, Analytics, Customer Service, and Product teams acquired information to build strategies that effectively attracted clients and supported the customer experience. It also helped define which personas are the most relevant to the business, allowing Creditas to better focus energy and money on serving them.
Innovation Relevance
We learned about a new type of customer for the Brazilian market. While before there was no information about how Brazillian customers would interact with collateralized loans, now the company had a better understanding of the customers' behavioral models and how to serve their needs, empowering Creditas' business results.
Impact on Myself
At the beginning of my design career, this was an immense challenge, a leap of faith that made me push myself to deliver a high-standard solution that I'm very proud of. I was responsible for building the Product Design team for a high-potential startup, learning to form a design culture, and connecting to mentors to speed up my learning curve.
Relevant Links
Creditas website: https://www.creditas.com.br/
More information about Creditas: https://tcrn.ch/2JsifMr
