Simple, the upstart Seattle-based digital bank, was in a quandary. They wanted to support their growing customer service operation with an Integrated Voice Response system, also known as a phone tree, but they feared doing so would irritate their fiercely loyal customers, who see the company as the “un-bank,” a decidedly human alternative to large, impersonal financial institutions. They asked Spring Studio to design and test a prototype that would surprise and delight their exacting users.
I worked closely with a pair of talented UX researchers and the bank’s head copywriter to create the experience from scratch. None of us had ever worked on a phone tree before, but good content is good content, right?
Although most customers dislike the phone tree experience, we found in our research that there was an opportunity to create one that Simple's customers would love, as long as they followed a few key rules.
This was our basic approach to the project.
There are a lot of best practices for phone trees, but we found not all of them made sense for our project.
We designed a content strategy that divided the content into modular "chunks" that we could easily move around to test different scenarios with users.
We wanted to make the prototypes as realistic as possible, so we recorded prompts with Keynote.
There were three rounds of testing with actual Simple customers, which enabled us to try out different versions of the content and iterate until we found a formula that won over both Simple customers and those worried corporate stakeholders.
The version that Simple customers liked the best was very, well, simple. The main menu had five main choices. We added a sixth choice with entertaining content that people could choose to hear if they were feeling curious — a little something to surprise and delight them in keeping with Simple's quirky brand personality.
These are some of the other content chunks that we included, all of them carefully written in the Simple voice and tone.
We had fun experimenting with entertaining content that you don't usually hear in a phone tree, like fun animal facts and money tips from Simple customers. importantly. we discovered that this content was greatly appreciated by a majority of Simple customers, but only if it was optional.