Evelyn Partners
Making Onboarding 30% Faster
Background
Imagine yourself as the COO of Evelyn Partners - one of the UK’s largest wealth management firms. Unfortunately you realise your onboarding takes too long, which is your critical gateway for revenue, and decide to focus on fixing this. You are already involved with Backbase, who was helping with your client portal and ask them to collaborate with your team to come up with a streamlined onboarding 'minimum loveable product' (MLP).
Role and responsabilities
As the saying goes, collaboration is key
As the UX Designer from Backbase, my role was to collaborate with Evelyn Partners' stakeholders and my Backbase team to redesign their onboarding process.
I was purposefully selected for this project because of my expertise in running workshops, research abilities, rapid prototyping, and solving complex UX challenges . Additionally, my native English skills—paired with a touch of Australian wit—enabled me to build strong rapport with stakeholders right from the start.
Research and collaboration
Identifying the problems
We kicked things off with a two-day workshop where I analysed the existing onboarding workflow and mapped out each step to identify redundancies and bottlenecks.
I also facilitated various stakeholder interviews to gather technical restraints, business goals, user needs and compliance requirements.
However, given the high-net-worth profile of Evelyn’s clients and the corresponding access limitations, I had to rely significantly on the insights provided by the onboarding team. Additionally, I analysed legacy support tickets to proactively address recurring issues.
Key insights
Things I learned from research
1.
Onboarding was taking between six months to a year
Competitive research suggested other wealth management firms with just as high net worth individuals were taking a maximum of three months to onboard.
2.
Employers who did the onboarding at Evelyn were not guided throughout the process
They had to know the process. This meant there was room for error and replacing the specialists took much longer.
3.
Prospects had no visibility of the onboarding process
This meant they didn't know what was required or how far through they were.
4.
Tasks were very manual
Employees relied heavily on email, which was also a problem for visibility if employers left the company.
Problem statement
"Evelyn's wealth onboarding process needs radical simplification to reduce manual tasks, automatically guide the process, and provide real-time transparency, enabling faster, more client-centric service."
The solution
Guiding users through automated actions that can be completed on the platform and providing visibility
The new designs focused on guiding both the employer and prospect throughout the onboarding process by automating the actions necessary for completion. Certain actions were only visible once other actions were completed. This meant that the employer could spend more time focusing on the customer experience and look after more prospects.
Incorporating milestone steppers for both forms and the onboarding dashboard, allowed employers and prospects to see what they were in the process.
Providing all functionalities to complete the actions through the platform such as, document upload, messaging, forms, and document signing. This allowed all communication and documents to be in one place and easily found.
Results
The solution that created a big impact
UAT Feedback: 90% of onboarding reps found the new process more intuitive and user-friendly than the previous system.
Efficiency Gains: Testing showed a 40% reduction in time spent on specific tasks, indicating greater future efficiency in client onboarding.
Satisfaction Scores: Post-training surveys reflected a 75% satisfaction rate among reps, signaling a positive response and confidence in the redesign.
Projected Improvements: Efficiency gains suggest client onboarding time could drop to three months or less, meeting our initial goals.
Challenges
The importance of being flexible in processes.
We faced numerous technical constraints from both Backbase and Evelyn Partners, but where standard workarounds weren’t feasible, we implemented tailored development solutions. A key achievement was creating a fully internal Forms Application Framework, which allows for seamless progressive disclosure of form fields that enhanced the flexibility of the onboarding process.
Again, a major challenge also was not getting direct access to onboarding prospects for testing, so the workaround was to rely on insights from Evelyn’s onboarding representatives.