Video: How Lloyds Bank used Diary Studies to get Closer to their Customers?

Transcript

NB this transcript starts from 10M 10S and has been lightly edited for accuracy

Use of Indeemo at Lloyds

We tried this tool called Indeemo -which means In the Moment and I think it is such an important tool because that’s where we want to reach out to our customers when they are at their own comfort. The problem is when you sit someone down across the table and when you say this is the task you have to do about money people shut down. Either they don’t tell you about it or they lie. Yes people do one of two things when asked about money no matter how good or bad you are. Either I do not tell you about it or I will lie about it. So it was very much about “Can we talk about your money in the safety of your house in a time that is convenient for you and in a  way you want to talk about it not in a way we want to ask you about it but in a way you want to talk about it.”

This is what the Indeemo tool helped us to work through. It is especially helpful for vulnerable customers because the one thing no one wants to talk about is how much did you spend on betting? These are the darkest secrets people don’t even tell their partners. 

• Why do you spend £100 every month on betting?

• Why do you want to spend on the lottery?

No one wants to talk about it.

You have to bring people to wherever makes them comfortable whether it's in their house or the time of the day to enable them to talk freely. We as humans have a tendency to drop barriers the moment we are openly asked anything about our money.

So this tool as Lucinda will explain helped us at least have a connection with our customers during research in which they could give us honest and open insight into what they wanted to do.

Lucinda (12M 0S)

I've got a boring slide here to talk about a very exciting tool, which is Indeemo. Anarug and I are obviously not here to sell Indeemo, we're talking about mobile ethnography.

This is the platform we used, obviously there are other platforms.

Some Context 

Five years ago I used to work for Marks and Spencers big British retailer, we used something similar that is called the thinking shed which does very similar stuff. 

Just a couple of sentences about myself, I am a qualitative researcher by profession. I've spent a lot of my life doing focus groups in England, instead of just doing it in one way labs, historically been like we literally went to recruiters homes and did research in the suburbs. 

So I've got a lot of history of face to face research and it's what I love, that's kind of, you know, that's what's paid my mortgage being a qualitative researcher, and I was a freelancer and I ran my own company. 

Moving forward, I moved from market research into design research or UX research which is, you know, subtly different but has the same underlying values that you're looking at. Effectively customer motivation and what makes people engage with things. I've been lucky to end up working with Anurag, and as he's described we've got this kind of really interesting challenge of trying to get under the surface, about how people think and feel about their money. It would be far too long a story to tell you all the methodology we use so we just kind of like focusing on this one thing but we obviously look at it in a sort of triangulated way so we've got masses of data coming into the bank from all sorts of sources. And this is just something that we did, we actually did it as a proof of concept so I mean this is we're talking about having just run one study. We were also kind of slightly given a fait accompli because of our procurement people which you can imagine this kind of massive because with the organization we are. 

We said we wanted a diary study tool we want a diary store diary tool, and an ethnography thing, and it has to go through all sorts of like risk committees and I have to mention the dreaded GDPR, how we kind of store people's information, particularly when we're storing videos and pictures and data about their spending is obviously kind of absolutely essential. Which means that I can't show you a lot of really exciting stuff. I mean I can show you on a one to one basis, I can't kind of show you at a conference and have it all have it all recorded. 

The Role of the Moderator

In essence, everybody knows what Instagram is like, and I mean I think the Indeemo tool is similar to other proprietary tools. It works like that, you get a notification that a task has been uploaded. You do the task you send it to the researcher, and indeed only stakeholders who've got access to the logins can instantly see what's been uploaded. You know you've got a constant dialogue. So, I mean, it gave me quite a sort of hard job I mean this is my word of warning to everybody that it was a such a 24 seven job because when people uploaded their little videos I didn't want to just say “Helen thanks for your video” I wanted to say, “Helen thanks for your video and I like the story about the rabbit”. So I've got to, you know, I got to watch the video too then you know I didn't just want to do a generic response so I was doing it at the weekend, you know all the time, but it was fun. And because as I said at the beginning of my story I was going and meeting people face to face in focus groups. I was absolutely amazed at how engaging and personal and human. This felt, these people they're not in a chat room I mean, there are other programs that do that. These people were posting their stuff to me. They weren't looking at each other's stuff. I mean I felt kind of because it was over three weeks. I developed a different sort of relationship than you develop in 90 minutes in a kind of focus group with people. So it was a really good experience. It's a really fun experience. 

What else can I tell you about it. Anurag’s kind of touched on this but we talk at Lloyds a lot about mental models so we're obviously trying to understand where people are coming from and the whole kind of context and the whole kind of lifestyle, which obviously influences their views about money management and spending. And we work in a mobile first lab we're also doing stuff on browsers, and on the internet but we you know we designed everything mobile first. Hence, it was quite interesting to be using a kind of mobile testing method for mobile first materials.

Recruitment and Incentives

Okay as researchers you'll be interested in the nitty gritty of how we find the people, how did we incentivize them etc. 

So, as I say our proof of concept was 20 participants for three weeks, obviously. One of the benefits of kind of like a diary study is the longitudinal aspect. So if we were using this again to look at attitudes to taking out a mortgage for example, you probably want to extend it longer than three weeks but that's just, just what we had in this instance. We had 20 people which was good because I could just about cope with knowing who those 20 people were when I was responding. I could kind of remember that. First up load which is their sort of intro better etc. More than 20, you know, you begin to kind of lose a sense of who the individuals are. We gave them 20. The, the way that the program works is through these tasks, and we sat around as a team and thought right you know, because we were sort of suddenly told we got permission to use this tool. And we had to kind of really kind of scramble to gather some ideas about what we were going to do with it because it kind of came out of a hat, kind of, suddenly, and because it was a proof of concept we'd got to like wrap it up in 90 days so we kind of went into it went into it fast. But what we decided as a team and I think this kind of really was massively beneficial is, lets not just ask people about money. Let's ask people about their lives and then slip in some money questions, and of course that gives you much more much richer contextual staff. 

And as Anarug has said, you know, anything you ask people about kind of has some financial implication anyway. And one of our really good copywriters had this great idea, Let's ask them about food. Let's ask them about food shopping. And I was asked to sort of god this is a bit going off tangent. Why are we asking them about food shopping, but it was actually really revealing because people could enter the gate and kind of quite a loose brief they could interpret it however they liked. Some people showed us the inside of their fridge, some people showed us the takeaway and some people showed us a bill for the restaurant meal they had last night. And it's kind of like a proxy for how affluent you are or how squeezed you feel, and you can tell a lot about people in terms of which supermarket they shop at etc. So that was super interesting. 

So, yes, you know, we asked them a lot of money stuff but we warmed them up by asking them more user-friendly things about shopping and life. And then as I say, you know, the point of three weeks is to do some kind of tracking, which would be more relevant if we were asking about a product purchase which had stages but we did ask them each week, tell me anything new, anything exciting that's happened, or any, any kind of surprises or any pain points I think was what we tracked and repeated across brands and segments.

Anurag has told you we were looking in this instance at high income professionals, rising metropolitans, and homeschooling families. 

More Diverse Audience (19M 55S)

And the recruitment was done via sort of standard qualitative researchers, but we do a lot. We probably do too much work in London and the southeast and obviously because this is online, we could get people in Scotland, the north or the South. And yes, we would have had more. We did get a more diverse audience, because by definition people could do it at home, etc etc.

Setting Tasks

And you can probably guess what a task is so they send a little description they are told, do you want to, you know, you specify whether you want a photo or a video or a note or a screen recording. You can post, you know, several tasks at a time or one by one, it's got all sorts of different ways in which you can do this. I find it interesting. It might not make a lot of sense to you, but I mean again. Coming from a market research background I'm used to asking in a kind of quite long winded formal questions. I'm talking quant now but you know on a scale of one to five where one means low and five means, five, five minutes high What do you think about blah blah blah blah blah. In this day and age people are much more snappy and conversational in their language. So we, these are the titles of our tasks, and you can probably see some of them are quite self explanatory. So Money Talks was, you know, to draw a picture of where your money goes. And I was amazed at how simple, we gave people really simple instructions partly because we wanted people to be creative, we didn't want to guide people too much about how they responded, but it was a massive learning for me, that you can you can make the questions just much more particularly for a bank it hasn't got to be in bank language you can make make it much, much more every day. And I should have liked to think that because our questions were creative we got more, we got a more creative response.

The Output

So what did we get? I mean we got a massive volume of stuff so you know more than 500 detailed contextual customer stories. I've still got all these videos that I've got to do analysis on and we didn't pay for the video transcript. So if you're doing this for God's sake pay for the video transcripts because yeah you want to watch the videos but you don't have to do all the transcribing yourself. 

So we got reams of information and we've got information that we could use the day it came in. Plus, there's a whole kind of repository of information that we can go back to. So, this just kind of gives you an idea of what one of the dashboards looks like. 

And as I say anybody that's interested in the detail I can show you, like, like any dashboard you could you could look at it by gender, men versus women you could look at it by our different fresco segments you could look at all the responses to one question, you can look at all the picture responses you know there's a million, million and one ways in which you can do it. And you can tag it so like, you know, we're interested in people's views on overdrafts so we could target any comment that was made about overdrafts and then we've got, you know, instantly if a stakeholder says as they often do or place, you know, right, we need a comment on overdrafts tomorrow, we could pull off here, you know 50 anecdotes about people's overdrafts. So it's very flexible. 

I was talking earlier about the food one, so many you know I love that picture of a cake you know somebody's taken a photograph of some fantastic cake they've made. So, massively fascinating and anybody that's interested in ethnography, anthropology or the rest of it. Yes, we weren't there in their homes for three weeks, but people were very open, I thought about what they showed us. 

We work with service designers who are obviously very interested in mental models, how people think, so when we ask people, you know what, ask me the title of the talk, where does your money go? And you know, I love this. You know it's your family, your home, your car, etc. Just, it speaks volumes, and we've got zillions of these pieces of paper which are just really helpful for us.

This looks more boring on the screen but it's just to show you that I mean, I mean, I guess people have got those, I could look at what time of night people were doing this but people put in so much information. And you can see the sorts of ways in which we can use it. 

Word Clouds

The tool automatically makes nice word clouds for you. And this, you know, it's just interesting isn't it what jumps off the page that people are talking about their clothes and their holidays, you know, we know that's what people like thinking about clothes and holidays. Their savings is really small and, you know, we're worried as a nation, about how little people save the word pensions doesn't even appear on the page. 

You can tell that we're really enthusiastic about this and as I say we're not trying to sell Indeemo, we're just interested in the idea of mobile ethnography.

19 out of 20 of our people kind of stayed the course. People rated it really highly. There was a little blip at the beginning when we were trying to get this out at a bank holiday weekend and so we lost one person because of our messy timing. 

And I think we would have had a nine out of 10 score again if our timing had been better than it was when we launched the thing. And, you know, this business about faster, cheaper, higher quality. I really didn't think I'd say this at the beginning but this was faster and it was cheap, but it wasn't low quality, which I find very interesting.

Anurag (25M 45S)

Yeah. So indeed I think I've already described, a lot of it but the for me the highlight of this was we've got the people to open up about a very sensitive topic and a lot of people recognize a lot of other things sexuality, religion and all that stuff and we're like these are sensitive topics but believe me talking about money is right up there. 

People don't like to talk about their money. They don't want to talk about how they manage their money. And I think this tool helped us get in a very creative way an insight into what customers are thinking and I've got loads of data which will now analyze, so that for me was the highlight.

Q&A

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