BRIAN HOADLEY

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Brian Hoadley

Transformation and digital organizational design consultant and leader

Case Studies

Lloyds Banking Group

Goal: To establish and embed an in-house Design Research, Optimization and Insight function (Customer Labs)

Impacted Teams: Research, Insight, Optimization, Design, Digital Customer Experience, Product Management

Team size: 40

Locations: London, Bristol, Halifax, Edinburgh

Introduction

Lloyds Banking Group was going through a large-scale transformation. Having built a high-spec in-house research lab in their digital center, they wanted to explore developing an in-house research team to support their transformation efforts.

When I was brought in, I had one lab and one contract UX researcher at my disposal. Shortly after joining, recruitment was frozen. So what to do.

I used the time to conduct a cost-benefit analysis using external agencies. I looked at the average cost per study, what types of research were being conducted, and ran an analysis on the total cost of hiring a researcher and total number of studies they could reasonably conduct in a year. I factored in support costs and built a model to understand the true cost of external supplier use vs. in-house development of a research capability.

When the time came I delivered a business case that received funding. Over two years, I worked with this client to design an in-house research agency, and grew the team to 40 researchers, insight analysts and A/B testing specialists.

The team had extremely high employee engagement scores, was a desirable destination for others in the bank, helped reduce reliance on external suppliers, reduced overall cost per research activity, contributed to a reduction in developer rework, and improved customer engagement with the bank's digital products and services.

What did I do?

Supporting people, teams and the business

At Lloyds Banking Group, across nearly 3.5 years of engagement, I was able to work across and apply elements of the first six stages of my framework. These included:

Assessing their needs, and a major program of work
Shaping the requirements for building a new practice
Recruitment of 40 people across Research, Insight, Optimization and ResearchOps
Onboarding of all new team members
Building out a solid and sustainable practices
Embedding the practice into the business to meet its transformation and ongoing product needs

My efforts helped launch and embed an entirely new capability inside the bank supporting (at the time) Lloyds Banking Group's 17 million customers across 4 major brands.

Assess

As happens in large corporates in the run-up to end of year, a hiring freeze was put into place shortly after I arrived to build a new research capability. I had one exceptional contract researcher and a fully high-spec research lab but no team to run it. Not wanting to wait it out, and knowing the situation was temporary, I did the next best thing.

First, I reached out to project teams to better understand their research needs and cadences of work. This gave me a heads up to the capacity and capability needs our digital teams might have.

The second thing I did was engage with the largest digital project, the redesign of the banks core Internet banking functionality. Across a range of qualitative and quantitative research activities, design for the new IB functionality wasn't performing well...and no one understood "why".

The third thing I did was to work with procurement and finance to understand the extent of the spend on research across our teams which ultimately enabled me to deliver an analysis of in-house investment vs. third party supplier engagement.

And finally, even though we didn't yet have the investment to build a research team, we did have a fully operational high-spec lab located in London. I reached out to the research agencies on our supplier list, and mandated, that where feasible, they would begin to conduct their research in that lab, on-site, so that we could at least begin to build a connection between colleagues across Group Digital and our research facility. This paid dividends later in the form of building a strong association with the research function, our labs, team, and ultimately our customers.

IB research analysis and recommendations

In order to try and give voice to issues identified in the research conducted on the bank's new Internet Banking redesign, I reviewed over 10 major research studies, nearly 500 pages of reports, conducted with hundreds of users, across a mix of qualitative and quantitative activities.

This resulted in identifying 4 recurring issues / themes that needed to be addressed, as identified by Customers during the research. After conducting a careful analysis, I presented the outcome with a set of recommendations to the Group Transformation Director.

This resulted in the teams being directed to focus on resolution of those issues, which ultimately resulted in both an uptick in Customer engagement during our subsequent research studies as well as a much shorter engagement dip when the new service went live.