The Future of Money Coaching
Role: Design strategist | Team 2 designers | Company: Capital One | Timeline: August 2020 – July 2021 |
Where we are now: The project was launched in late 2021 and evolved into what is now the Money & Life Program
Your Money, Your Values
The Money & Life Program is a series of in-person and digital experiences established through the Capital One Cafes that help people of all financial situations develop healthier relationships with their money. The Future of Money Coaching project explores a strategic vision within this portfolio for a service that helps people establish more clarity and agency around their financial behaviors.
Curiosity
Background
In 2013, Capital One conducted research into spending behavior in people across the financial spectrum. The common thread amongst participants was that money is very hard to talk about openly and that attitudes around spending and saving are deeply connected to values and emotions rather than rational thinking. As a result of these insights, Capital One built the Money Coaching Program, a 1:1 conversation-based workshop designed to help people build more awareness around their values and financial behaviors so that they could spend and save more intentionally.
The problem with a free service
While MC was very well regarded internally and by participants, the product team did not have a clear picture of its impact on the business or peoples’ financial lives, well-being or behavior. Without these insights it was difficult to understand how to adjust the service to better serve the target audience while bringing value back to Capital One. My team and I were tasked with finding out more about the impact of MC so that we could
(1) propose ideas to bring value back to the bank
(2) propose ideas for pivoting the service to better serve participants
(3) scale the service to more potential participants
Money Coaching in 2020
When I joined the project in 2020, the program was run by certified life coaches and available at all Capital One Cafes. Despite what the name of the service implies, Money Coaching (MC) is not financial advising. In fact, sometimes money doesn’t even come up at all. The philosophy of the service was to be both accessible and approachable to as many people as possible through a three-step approach:
• Entry: Any client can come and sit with a coach at any time, no matter their state of mind or financial situation
• Engagement: Clients are entitled to three, free 60m sessions during which Money Coach uses coaching skills and Capital One-created digital tools to help participants connect their money with their life and values
• Exit: Coaches work with clients to create meaningful commitments they can act on
Research
The initial discovery work that predated me was done with internal stakeholders. (For compliance reasons, we were not allowed to talk to MC participants). In reviewing these earlier conversations, my design partner and I found a range of perspectives that were all valuable but out of sync.
• Marketing: “I want to turn Money Coaching participants into new or better engaged customers”
• Tech: “I want to be able to leverage the great tools we already have without building a whole new suite of products”
• Design Leadership: “I want to be able to measure the impact of Money Coaching so that we can use the insights to build more effective solutions for customers”
• Money Coaches: “I want my sessions to result in longer term and more tangible positive outcomes for participants without exploding the amount of work I have to take on”
In order to start to build alignment, my design partner and I used this previous research to synthesize an initial opportunity statement for the future of Money Coaching:
Creativity
Getting fresher stakeholder input
Before embarking on ideation, my design partner and I agreed we wanted more input from our stakeholders in order to capture their knowledge about the program's years of successes and failures. The last research had been done a few years ago, and it was time to update our understanding of where the service was going. I advocated for holding separate co-creation sessions with each group of stakeholders in order to avoid group-think. My design partner and I collaborated on designing virtual workshops and ran four of them over the course of two weeks. Our goals were:
(1) Understand what our stakeholders saw as both successful and desirable at each stage of the participant journey
(2) Understand where to place the most emphasis on the journey for greatest participant impact
(3) Understand how to best leverage the skills and energy of the Money Coaches
(4) Identify places to invite participants to engage with more parts of the Capital One ecosystem
The result of our workshops were a series of insights around where the service was falling short across all parts of the engagement model:
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Customers had little understanding of what to expect before sitting with a coach, and this lack of prep had the potential to diminish the quality of the conversation
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Three 60m sessions over-delivers on the value that money mentoring can offer at the expense of other services that can help customers develop financial well-being
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Customers more need accountability and support for turning commitments into meaningful behavior change
Defining business value
In addition to gathering more qualitative feedback, I wanted to create a better framework for defining and measuring progress towards our goals. In order to do this, I created a business value tracker and worked with our partners to assign value to each of the metrics we were capable of tracking. Creating this tracker allowed us to do a few things:
(1) Align across all stakeholders on what we were going to track to evaluate the service and how we were going to track it
(2) Identify baseline metrics to match our progress against
(3) Define what was in and out of scope for MVP
Building alignment
With an understanding of where MC wasn’t measuring up and how we could better track and measure impact, my design partner and I to created a rough series of storyboards that illustrated the most desirable futures from MC. These told a diverse set of stories for how Capital One could enhance the MC experience through existing resources and new investments that would grow both participant and business impact.
We took these storyboards back to our partners in a larger workshop and used them as a starting point to co-create a high level but unified agreement on what the new model should include, how it should impact participants, the business and how we could better support the Money Coaches themselves.
Creating an MVP
Previously, the model governing how Money Coaching Participants interacted with the service was Enter, Engage, and Exit. We reframed this journey: Enter, Engage and Extend, which better described the desired relationship between the business and participants after Money Coaching. At each stage, we proposed small but meaningful adjustments to mitigate for the ways in which the service wasn’t living up to it’s potential.
Finalizing an ideal user journey
With a concrete path for the Future of Money Coaching defined, we wanted to make the impact of our proposed MVP more concrete for stakeholders to drive buy-in. In order to accomplish this, we created a unified user journey that emphasized the new touch-points in the interaction model.
Through conversations with Money Coaches about their experiences with participants and in-depth customer segmentation and traffic data, we created a persona that we believed represented the kinds of individuals Money Coaching was best positioned to help.
Meet Kai.
She's a young single mom with a new baby and a busy job. While Kai has some basic financial literacy, her new status as a parent is turning most of what she thought she knew upside down. She doesn't feel confident about her current spending habits or how they'll have to change as her first child gets older. She's maintaining, but increasingly anxious.
One afternoon, during the sweet refuge of nap time, Kai is perusing some videos on basic financial literacy for new parents. During her search, Kai runs across an ad for Money Coaching with Capital One, and is delighted to find that she can use the service even though she isn't a customer of the bank. Talking to another human is exactly what she needs.
Enter
Engaging & short pre-coaching experience designed to prime customers for the experience
Kai chooses a coach from the list of profiles and finds a date that works for her. Shortly after confirming, Kai's new Money Coach reaches out with a short intro and some information about what to expect. He also sends Kai a brief, interactive questionnaire designed to prime her for the experience.
Kai texts her own mother to arrange babysitting. Even though the service is offered virtually, Kai could use some time out of the house.
Needs met
• Marketing: MC should be organically discoverable across platforms
• Cafe & Branch Product Team: MC should remain available for everyone, even if they are not a Capital One customer.
• Money Coaches: MC should emphasize personal connection and convenience so that participants feel comfortable talking about their finances and values
• Participants: It should be easy to find, schedule, and adjust sessions no matter where in the country I live
Engage
New, optimized coaching guide that prioritizes high impact, research backed activities earlier in the conversation
When Kai shows up at the Cafe for her first session she immediately connects with the Money Coach. During their hour together, the Money Coach uses the questionnaire Kai completed as a jumping off point to get to know and select the right tools to help Kai think through her relationship with money and how to adjust it to feel more confident and in control.
Kai leaves the session feeling energized and with some optional exercises she can progress on virtually through her Money Coaching account.
Needs met
• Tech: MC should rely on a suite of diverse but simple tools that don't require custom maintenance
• Cafe & Branch Product Team: MC should encourage traffic to the cafe and branches
• Money Coaches: Capital One should give me access to an array of digital tools that allow me to personalize the experience with each participant. During sessions, digital tools should support not replace my face-to-face conversations with participants
• Participants: "Homework" should be minimal and self-guided
Extend
New, remote friendly coaching tools that help clients build a concrete and accountable plan for action on their defined goals
Over the next few weeks, Kai slowly progresses through the activities her Money Coach gave her, which are available both in her Money Coaching portal online and the Capital One app. The exercises are designed to help her take note of where she is spending, which expenses cause her the greatest worry and which ones she feels good about. After about a month, her Money Coach reaches out to her with a personal message through the app, and Kai schedules another session to follow up on her learnings.
Needs met
• Tech: Experiences on web and mobile should be equivalent to minimize extra work and arbitrary uniqueness
• Cafe & Branch Product Team: Participants should be encouraged to stay within the Capital One ecosystem after Money Coaching
• Money Coaches: I should be able to use existing tools to give each participant a personal experience without creating too much extra work for me
• Marketing: Participants should be encouraged to use Capital One products regardless of their customer status
Impact
Final Recommendations
Our final deliverable was a comprehensive vision story that illustrated the Future of Money Coaching anchored in our stakeholder feedback, business needs, technical limitations and customer research.
Feedback
We were able to do some initial testing both with Money Coaches and current Capital One customers, some of whom had been exposed to the service and some of which had never heard of it. During these sessions, our Money Coaches used prototypes of our new resources and engagement model. We measured these conversations by gathering pre and post feedback from both participants and Money Coaches.
Participants | 16 current Capital One customers, 3 Money Coaches
Timeline | June-August 2020
After these 'test' sessions, we found that many of our hopes for how the service would impact participants and Money Coaches were holding true when mapped against our key changes to the service
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The majority of clients felt more prepared for the conversation and thought that the experience was the right length and required investment
Coaches felt more grounded and better equipped to work with clients
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When compare to our baseline survey, clients showed similar levels of satisfaction for their coaching experience, suggesting that the new model isn’t sacrificing on customer value
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Coaches and clients felt that the new tools made it more concrete and productive to talk about action
“This was such a fun and motivating experience and I hope you offer this to the future of your customer base. I would definitely take advantage of this service and would recommend it to my family and friends who I also think would benefit from it.”
“The new iteration evolves the current offering, increases participant confidence and empowers coaches.”
The blueprint we outlined through the vision story as well as our early testing gave the business confidence to move forward with more widely incorporating our recommendations into what is today called the Money & Life Program. Our work was an important part of this portfolio's rebrand and continues to be used by Coaches in the program. Today, the Program includes "Mentoring" (the rebrand of "Coaching"), a series of short, self-guided exercises that anyone can do on their own time, as well as a number of self-guided resources designed to let anyone engage at their own pace.