Designing Trust: TD Bank’s Human-Centered Innovation

gaming is becoming more and more popular. And certainly, it's something we've been looking at and thinking about in terms of how do we make sure that the TD brand is present. And this is a very unique and more innovative way that we've done it, where we've actually created a game. 

[music] Welcome to SimplyCX, where we bring you customer voices and expert insights. I'm Nicole McKinley, leader of Global Customer Experience at Microsoft. TD Bank has a long history across North America as a leading financial services institution. They're known for their high-touch and personal customer experiences. So today, I'm very excited to talk with Imran Khan, TD Bank's Head of Innovation and Design. Imran, thank you for joining us. 

I know you started your journey at TD Bank back in 2010. I'm super intrigued about how you've evolved your work around customer experience from the brick and mortar banking world to serve the next generation of banking clients who honestly may never see the inside of their bank branch at all. AI has impacted almost everything when it comes to customer engagement and really every aspect of our lives, and it's all evolving super fast. So I'd love to just start with what has surprised you the most about how customer expectations are changing. 

The change has been very rapid, just how quickly customers are adopting some of these new technologies. It certainly feels different from what we've seen in the past. You have hundreds of millions, if not billions, of users that are using intelligent agents of some sort all over the world. And we see it in our own environment. So within our contact center, we have agents, human agents, that answer our calls from our customers through voice-based calls or in some kind of online medium where it's a live chat with an agent. And recently adapted our internal experience for our colleagues in the contact center to be able to use intelligent agents to find information, to service customers. 

What I noticed with that is very quickly, even the agent that can now use that system, their expectations have changed really quickly. In the past, they would have to scour through potentially multiple documents. Now they get a summarized response for them. But if that response is too long, then they'll tell us about it. And so you've significantly streamlined the experience, but then it's really, really important to keep investing and keeping on top of it because it is evolving very, very quickly, both inside our organization and outside our organization. 

And I imagine one of the challenges is also just keeping pace with the revving of the technology, but also these rapidly changing expectations. And I love the example you just gave of your call center agents who now are engaging in really shaping and defining what the experience should be for them to do their jobs better. How do you keep pace with the feedback that's coming in, in this case, from your contact center support agents? 

We get feedback, obviously, internally from our own agents, and it's really important to use techniques that we've developed, more traditional techniques when it comes to design, design research techniques where we're observing our agents use these services internally, but also observing our customers, bringing them in, having them try things, testing them, and through interviews, through other types of technology where we can see how effective these experiences are for them, we get really, really good insights. And so that helps us really understand how well these technologies are going to work for our context. But we also stay very connected to the broader innovation ecosystem around us. 

There's a lot of innovation happening at FinTechs, at large organizations like Microsoft, for example. And staying connected to those folks is really important because it allows us to see kind of what is happening on the cutting edge, what are some of the trends that are going to materialize and evolve in the customer ecosystem and it's really important to use these technologies and make sure that we are gaining these key skills and understanding how these technologies can better help us deliver experiences for our customers. In fact, I recently was helping my daughter. She wanted to invest. Because she's 15, she can't herself get an investment account because you have to be 18. 

So I decided to see if I could get ChatGPT to help me sort of figure out how to do this. So I asked ChatGPT, I said, "Hey, I only want TD answers." So it gave me only TD answers, and it shared a TD product, a trust product that I could manage as a parent, but put it in my daughter's name. So that once she turned 18, then it becomes hers. And in the meantime, as the parent, I would be able to manage the account for her. And so that was a TD product that we were able to get information on without ever going to the TD website. 

And so that's a really interesting insight in that most of us, if we're using an intelligent agent or all kinds of other questions, and we've already provided some context, our preference will be to stay within that channel. So for organizations like TD and others, we really have to think about what is the data that we have, what is the information, what are the actions that you can do that are exclusively done within our organizations and not publicly available. And we have to make those intelligent so that our customers will come to and engage with our properties. Obviously, doing your banking transactions, getting your own personal information, that's very important. And so having those options available to you as you visit your bank or whatever organization it is becomes really, really important versus just the public information, which can be accessed in other forms. 

Yeah, it really shows how the power of AI and not just AI solutions that you at TD Bank may be creating yourself, but the impact that external AI capabilities across the ecosystem can have on the customer experience. And I'd love to hear more about how you're thinking about that connection between external AI capabilities that are equally rapidly changing and enabling the experiences that you are yourself defining and innovating, and creating for TD Bank. 

It's actually very complex when you have a great deal of technological innovation is what I find because your focus on the end user or the customer tends to be more muted because you're seeing such a great level of technological innovation. And that's been fairly consistent throughout history. If you think about our first internet-based experiences, they were all text-based prompts. But that was amazing because I could access a whole bunch of information anywhere in the world. And so the experience was the worst it's ever going to be. But it was just so technologically advanced that everyone loved the idea of being able to collect information in that way. 

The first cell phones that were huge bricks, [laughter] not a great experience. But the fact that I could talk on the phone anywhere was such an amazing technological advancement that no one really cared at the time. But look how far both of those experiences have come once we got the focus back on the end user, and particularly when it comes to the design of those experiences. And I think we're going to see the same kind of evolution with the experiences of today where we're interfacing with intelligent agents. Currently, it's in a chat format. But that's going to continue to evolve. And as we get more human-centered and enhance our experiences, we're going to see that evolution. And it's something that we think about for financial services. What's the best way that we can create more intelligent experiences for our customers and for our own colleagues as well? 

I'd love to build off of your point on human-centered because as I talk to lots of customers and even as a customer myself, there is this kind of constant challenge of balancing how to remain human-centered, personalized in this age of AI, where the technology options at our fingertips are not only exponentially larger than they were even yesterday, but constantly growing. And striking that right balance between how to leverage the technology to deliver really human-centered, personalized experiences. And then you overlay that with the generational divides or differences. And I'm personally super fascinated by the rapidly changing expectations that we see across the different generations. And just as an example, my dad, who's in his 70s, and I think about him and his true deep connection and love for his bank locally to the point where he will spend upwards of 45 minutes to an hour when he actually walks into his local bank branch. He knows all of the employees there. He takes time to fill up his cup of coffee. He sometimes sits down and will read the newspaper while chatting, and he appreciates that friendly community connection and the fact that he's established these really deep relationships with the individuals that work at the bank. And then I contrast that to my four children, youngest of which is nine, and they've never set foot in a bank. And the concept of even managing money and having to think about what that entails, I think, is far outside kind of their perspective at this stage in life. And so I'm curious when you think about not just existing TD Bank customers, but think about the newer generations, alpha, gen beta. How are you thinking about balancing the need for human connection with this rapidly evolving set of technology capabilities, many of which we can't even predict what the future will bring? 

It's a great example that you shared, Nicole, about your father, and then you sort of contrasted that with your children. And for us, we really focus on connecting with our customers where they are. That's really important because if their preferred experience is in a store or a branch, then we're there for them. If their preferred experience is in a digital medium, we're there for them. And recently, for youth who don't have products or can't directly service with us through products because they might be too young, we still want to engage with them to help them when it comes to financial education, financial literacy, which we think is really important, particularly for you. And one great example of that is we created this game called Treat Island Tycoon, and it's the first ever financial literacy game on Roblox, which is a popular gaming and content creation platform for youth. Tree Island Tycoon aims to educate youth ages 10 to 14 in a way that makes financial learning fun and engaging. So the game itself is immersive, and it helps kids and teens learn essential money management skills, like earning money, spending money, saving money, and borrowing money. Players will take on a role of a young entrepreneur as they build their treat empire on a fantasy island with the help of an interactive guide that's named Penny the Bear. And the experience is available for free. And it's another way that we can kind of meet our youth, meet that demographic where they are, and engage them because you're right, they're just not engaging as much with branches and stores. But there will be moments where they do want to talk to humans because they're also on a learning journey, and they might prefer that avenue. 

Can you talk a little bit about how you measured success? And if, through this experience, new opportunities for impact that maybe weren't the initial objective of the focus of the video game emerged, if at all? 

So in the case of the game, it was really important for us to engage youth to understand how effective it was when it comes to financial literacy. That was really the objective. There's a couple of things we look at when we're measuring that. One is engagement. How engaged are the youths? What is their feedback on the game? Are they enjoying it? Are they coming back? And then it's a TD game, so it's giving us more brand recognition amongst youth. And that helps us with the youth, but also with the parents, because the parents then see how TD is delivering experiences that are helping to educate and improve the financial literacy of their children. And then ultimately, they may come back and create a TD account, but we know that if there's great engagement with their brand and it's positive and they're getting benefit, then that helps us. And there's a halo effect behind that. 

Super intriguing. I'm curious with this venture into the gaming world. Do you see gamification as a future scale modality for customer experience and financial services? 

I do. Gaming is becoming more and more popular. And, certainly, it's something we've been looking at and thinking about in terms of, how do we make sure that the TV brand is present? And this is a very unique and more innovative way that we've done it, where we've actually created a game. We've even sponsored gaming competitions in the past where we can actually test new, more innovative experiences with some of these early adopters to see if these experiences are appealing to them, and it gives us an opportunity to do research with a certain type of demographic. I think it's something we're going to continue to keep a focus on and make sure that we're there for the different segments that we work with and support. 

Yeah, I could imagine endless possibilities that could also envision the opportunity to embed this game, or games like it, into the education sector as well and really integrate that into the academic curriculum. That could be pretty powerful. 

That's a great idea. I mean, potentially, who knows how far this can go? But the game is something we're continuing to refine and improve. And if it's something that's really effective and it's driving value for our communities, then we'll certainly look to continue to invest in that. 

Exciting. I know a lot of businesses and leaders in the customer experience space are always looking for ways to deepen insights that come from customer experience, research, or intelligence, looking at connecting customer feedback, employee feedback, to your earlier point around your support center agents, with other data, whether that be behavioral data, business performance, or operational data. I'd love to hear just a little bit more about how you're approaching building really deep insights that look really across the entire spectrum of data and information you have at TD Bank at your fingertips to then enable you to identify and prioritize what to go after next. 

Yeah. I mean, we look at insights in many different ways. I'll talk a little bit about design research and how we sort of triangulate different sources of information with the customer. When we're doing design research, we're really looking to validate a new or novel concept. So if something is new, you don't want to invest significant amounts of money to implement it and then find out that it's not something that's going to work well. So you want to do that upfront as early as possible in the process. And so we like to do that at the concept phase. And so once you have a concept or some kind of experience, prototyping that, testing it, doing some research. And it's very important to triangulate that. And we have experts in human factors, anthropology, psychology, all kinds of different fields that come together to perform this research. And they're researchers. So they apply a scientific approach that then we can use to say, "Yes, this concept is really going to work with customers," or maybe we have some doubt. Maybe there's something in the research that's telling us that we need to revisit the concept and enhance it in some way, and then do some more research and testing. And so that becomes a really important feedback loop for us. And we use all kinds of different technologies to research. We have labs with this kind of one-way mirror where you can observe what's happening, how the customer is using the technology, observe if it's working well, if they're getting frustrated, if there's anything that might not be working well, and with the customer's permission, whoever we're doing the research with, we can even sense their emotion. They might say something's really good, but then we might see that they're very frustrated, or maybe it's not going so well. And so we can sort of gauge that through this type of research. And all of that insight becomes really important in formulating a response to say, "Is this concept working or is it not working?" And then of course, once something is launched, we have many mechanisms or feedback that we collect at an enterprise level through our customer experience teams. Our marketing team collects feedback from many different sources, which we can use to say, "Yeah, how is it actually performing in the field?" And that's after it's launched. And that becomes an important driver for new experiences as well, because it tells us what is working well, what needs to be enhanced or changed or modified in any way. And then we can also get insights from outside our four walls and see how experiences are evolving. We talked about intelligent agents that people are using more and more now. But there's lots of nuances to these experiences as well. Some of them have multiple different threads because you may be asking a question related to purchasing a home in one thread, but then you might be asking a question about how to invest for your child's education in another thread. And there are different threads. And so managing the context of those two things becomes really important. Preserving the context to begin with. So you have the information. You don't have to keep repeating the information. Things like that are really subtle, but super important and powerful that we're seeing in experiences outside of our four walls that are becoming adopted more and more. And so we have to keep an eye on that as well to see what are some of the best practices that are emerging at a time when there is a lot of change, a lot of transformational change that's happening, and more and more focus on CX, which is great to see. So it's not just about the technology, it's starting to become more and more about the customer experience as well. 

So really that diversity of the research and ensuring that you're really widening that aperture of all of the different insights and drivers of what may be a great novel new idea as well as a phenomenal experience that you're delivering, using all of that to really identify what those big new opportunities are, as well as the impact of what's been delivered, and is it making a difference or not? 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that is so critical for us to know whether something is going to work. And all of those insights coming together gives us a very good idea of that. And we know when something isn't going to work, we can determine that fairly easily with that kind of research. And in the past, when design design was less prominent across organizations, you would learn after you launch something. And that's really not when you want to find out the small investment to learn the effectiveness of these concepts. And so it makes a lot of sense to do that insight upfront. 

Any guidance for other innovation experience leaders in terms of how to approach these experiments, these tests, and how much percent of energy should be going into the experimental or testing domain versus research versus what you actually deploy. I know right now, again, one of the challenges with AI and the rapidly changing technology landscape is you want to seize the opportunity and not miss it in terms of innovation. But at the same time, you have to really make smart bets and be clear about what it is you're going to prioritize because if you go after everything, you may dilute the impact of anything. 

Focus is really important. Our organization, for example, has done a great job of really focusing on certain key use cases and scaling those. And in the same time, it doesn't prevent you from testing and doing that research quickly and pragmatically so that you're getting the insight that you need. And in my experience, that research element is not significant relative to the size of the program. And so it's worth it to do it. And it gives you really, really concrete insights that can help you understand if you're going to have an issue or not, even in a world where technology is evolving so quickly. Again, this happens in every major technological transformation. There tends to be less of a focus on the CX and the experience because it's just something so amazing, such a big step forward that without that focus, the technology alone is improving the previous way that you might have done something. And that was true for the cell phone, and that was true for the internet, and it's true now with intelligent agents and generative AI. But eventually, the focus on the experience becomes front and center as everybody starts adopting these technologies, and you're trying to differentiate and ensure that you're creating the optimal experience for your customers. And that's when that laser beam focus becomes really, really important. And I would say we're seeing more of it. We're seeing now more focus on design for these experiences that are based on generative AI. And I think that will continue to increase. This one particularly is quite an interesting challenge and problem for designers to address and really focus on just in the same way as the cell phone, the internet, and some of the other innovations that have happened have been. But I think this one even more so because of the level and scale of technological advancement and the power of this technology. 

So clearly, key use cases focusing on what it is you want to achieve and also focusing on differentiation is important. That's really great advice. I know TD Bank's commitment to accessibility is significant, and I've been personally super impressed. I imagine that was one of the key use cases where you saw a real opportunity to differentiate TD Bank in the marketplace. I'm curious if you could share a bit about the accessibility adapter and what led to the creation of this very cool capability. 

It's definitely one of my favorite initiatives that we've undertaken. It meshes technological innovation, customer experience innovation with something else that we care about a lot, and that's inclusion in innovation. We initially created it to support people with disabilities within our organization and enable seamless access to the tools they need to do their jobs. And what we learned was many, many more of our colleagues started to use this tool because said, you know what? I'm looking at a spreadsheet all day, and my eyes get tired. And this tool helps make the experience easier on my eyes. It's just better for me overall. Then we thought, "Well, why wouldn't we make this available to our communities outside of our organization that will make everyone's experience better? Whether they're using our services or not, because it's for accessibility anywhere on the web, on the internet." And the accessibility adapter, actually, the way it works is it allows you to adjust and personalize the experience to be tailored to your needs. For example, you can make the font size bigger, and a lot of people now like to use dark mode, and their internet experiences and things like that. And not every site may have that. And so the accessibility adapter allows you to do that. And at no cost, anybody in the public can use the accessibility adapter. So we've seen fantastic results, a significant amount of engagement externally, but also within our organization to support our own colleagues. 

I love this innovation, super powerful, just a phenomenal example of really enabling that personal experience, as you talked about, but also reducing effort and just making it easy as you engage. So well done. With that, Emron, I'd love just to hear lastly, what did you learn, whether it was through the building of the accessibility adapter or the last 15 years that you've been in your innovation leadership role, what learning has been most impactful for you that you would want to share with other customer experience and innovation leaders across the globe? 

We've experienced so much transformational change, technological evolution in our lifetime. But it always boils down to we're creating experiences for humans, for end users, and it's really important to keep that focus because that's ultimately what's going to give us as organizations the best customer experience. Ultimately, everybody's going to have access to technology. It's really going to boil down to, "Can you differentiate the experience with that technology?" 

Excellent advice. So tech is a commodity increasingly more than ever before. Tech and AI is a great enabler, but what's most critical is being people-first and really differentiating the experience for people. 

That's it. That's it, Nicole. 

The innovation that you and TD Bank are driving in what I would consider to be a traditionally non-innovative industry is really amazing. So I'd love to learn more. And this is just kind of just scratching the surface of what you guys are up to, but very, very cool. So thank you so much for spending some time with us. 

Thank you. Great to talk to you. 

[music] Thank you for listening to Simply CX. I'm Nicole McKinley. Our show is produced by Larj Media. That's L-A-R-J Media. Special thanks to Louisa Polka and Elizabeth Machado and to our video partner, PegLeg Pictures. To find out more about today's guest, Emron Khan, check out the links in the show notes. If you have your own challenges or questions about CX, email your questions to the show at SimplyCX@microsoft.com. And please share today's episode with someone you think could learn from it. And follow me on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going