ANZ says its ANZ Plus banking app has become an exercise in continuous development, with the bank becoming “obsessed” with how to acquire and incorporate customer feedback into its design.
Value stream lead at ANZx Danielle Curry told a Twilio RED event that direct customer feedback plays a vital role in how the bank's innovation arm, ANZx, focuses its engineering efforts in its new retail banking platform, ANZ Plus.
Curry said instead of focusing on building a product, ANZx is focusing on understanding the customer journey, and building around that.
“Our research, design, our engineering, our value centre all corral around those customer journeys and that's a very different mindset.
“It's not saying what's my product and how do I get to you – it’s saying what are you trying to do, and how are we all aligned around that.”
Curry added “within that, we kind of obsess about customer feedback” to ensure consumer responses are embedded back into the user journey.
Instead of using a "decoupled" web-based chatbot, ANZ Plus also opted to use a personalised chat experience for a stronger bespoke approach to customer support.
The “beautiful chat experience” - built in partnership with Twilio - has been heavily integrated into the mobile app and customer relationship management system, according to Curry.
“In our new experience if you're looking for support, you pop up with the preferred name, because we captured that in the joining experience and we have the context of where you are in the app," Curry said.
“We've tried to build that hyper personalisation all the way through, and then we have a coach on the other end who's able to access that personalised information as well.”
ANZx's aim with hyper personalisation is to anticipate what a customer's enquiry is going to be, and the combination of software and human coach is designed to refine that ability.
Curry said customers love this feature, and are surprised when they find ANZ already knows that they're asking about.
While “it took a bit longer to build” Curry said “making those engineering choices early around when you want to create features ... that you’re true to that hyper personalisation.”
Speaking to iTnews directly, Curry said the app was soft launched as a "minimum loveable product” (MLP).
This has allowed Curry and her team “to tweak some features” around messaging and language as the app releases new capabilities as part of its continuous development cycle.
“We thought we had enough features to get out there and test and that's been brilliant from a testing perspective.
“Going with that MLP was a really good decision to help us test and learn a bit because …you don't get as really rich learnings as when you've got it really in the hands of customers.
“We're getting loads of customer feedback, either people providing suggestions or when they chat with one of our coaches giving them ideas.”
Curry added in the ANZ Plus space, “we've started with the management money journey and we'll be looking at the buyer-owner home journeys later in the year as well.”
