Lending Transformation

The Project & the Challenge

The Lending Transformation Initiative is PNC's bank-wide effort to change and improve the mortgage and home equity lending experience for customers. The initiative was launched in an effort for the bank to become more competitive in the mortgage lending space, and includes changes to the bank's products, role and responsibilities for mortgage bankers, and the introduction of new software to support these changes,

The challenge of the project was to reimagine, test, and refine new customer and banker experiences for mortgage lending in PNC's branches, based on these changes that came from the initiative.

Workshop: current state and imagining future experiences

The project began with service design blueprinting of a PNC customer's journey as go into a branch to secure a mortgage loan to understand the pre-initiative current state. The design team then ran a workshop with subject matter experts from across the bank to understand the existing challenges and pain points along the journey, fo both customers and bankers. From these pain points, we created a set of design principles to serve as the foundation for an improved customer experience.

The teams then broke into groups to create new maps of an improved customer and banker experience in the branch — after creating these new experience blueprints, they then role played the experience, focusing on the critical banker-customer interactions. After role-playing, they edited and added to their blueprints to refine the experience based on the problems and hitchwes identified in the role-play.

After the session, our business partners helped us refine the new customer-banker service design blueprints, incorporating the design principles and learnings from the workshop:

Testing the Proposed Experience with Customers

These new service design models were then tested with consumers and bankers in our prototype branch environment. Testing the new scenarios with customers uncovered several findings about how we can improve the customer experience of getting a mortgage in a PNC branch, and over the phone. We introduced new and revised steps into the customer experience to make the process more clear, understandable, and less intimidating for the customer,  and to allow the banker to leverage his or her expertise in their new roles. These recommendations were then incorporated into the future-state service design blueprints.

The trainings for the new banker roles under the Lending Transformation Initiative were then shaped and refined based on our recommendations for improving the customer experience.

Testing the Banker Trainings

The team then conducted another test to understand how effective the training was in helping the bankers understand their changing roles under the initiative, as well as how the training would effect the proposed customer experience.

The testing involved having newly-trained bankers from across PNC role-play the mortgage lending experience with PNC employees unfamiliar with the initiative that served as customer-proxies.

Recommendations for Banker Training and Improved Service Design

The feedback from the testing helped inform a refined set of training videos, as well as a set of storyboards the team designed to illustrate suggestions for improved banker-customer interactions and services.

Project Outcomes — One-Stop Lending across PNC’s Footprint

The work we did on the Lending Transformation project was leveraged to create an improved service design experience for customers shopping for home equity loans and mortgages that includes a “one-stop” lending experience with an dedicated, newly trained team of home equity lending bankers.