Capital One’s Auto Finance division built an account management platform to help their customers view, manage and schedule payments on their auto loan account.

This is the story of how I collaborated with multiple stakeholders, as well as my design manager, to create a multi-phased plan minimize customer call volume by giving them the ability to self-service their auto loan account. We also designed and deployed the first phase of this plan, which reduced loan servicing call volume into the call center by 46% and increased monthly user interactions bt 222%.

The objective my team and I were presented with was to deliver better quantitative data to an active Auto Loan customer about their account, in every state their account may enter. This included redefining what the customer sees in each state, as well as re-imagining how we visualized their account data. With ~300K monthly unique web interactions and ~900K monthly unique mobile interactions on the Auto Loan customer’s dashboard and existing account tracker, there would be a huge customer pay off with delivering the right experience.

During the research phase, we discovered our existing design wasn’t satisfying the customer’s need to holistically track their on-time payoff date at-a-glance, early payoff date, their projected balance at maturity at-a-glance, as well as a matured loan with balance view. We needed to deliver a design that solved the customer pain points with an explorative, agile design approach we could deliver on quickly and test live, in-market.

By far this product release was the most successful release I had been a part of for an enterprise corporation. Even though we took a pilot release approach (gradually releasing to a limited number of customers at time).

So what about those results we set out to achieve? Here’s just a few of the results we were able to achieve:

• 46% reduction in inbound loan servicing calls

• Solidified customer loyalty

• 222% increase in monthly user interactions as customers began taking ownership of their loan accounts, self-serving and troubleshooting account needs on their own.

There were many wins besides just the direct business outcomes and results. This was the first time a cross-functional, user-driven design process had seen such a huge success. Before this project developers and project managers rarely collaborated except to estimate user stories. Design had never really been a fundamental part of the process. The process being used previously was more like waterfall with a few scrum processes thrown in, than true collaborative agility.