TY FOSTER
Work
About

CHARLES
SCHWAB

Schwab
Case study
2019-2021
Helping Schwab re-imagine what data integration and Salesforce can do to improve the employee and customer experience.
Starting at the beginning.
Wealth management is a tough skill to master.

The client advisors at Charles Schwab are amongst the industry's best, and their time is valuable. When faced with the task of saving time, it's critical to define a scope, understand who our stakeholders are, our core user group, who our downstream users are, and what our timeline is.

Having a framework in place before doing anything is always conducive to success. We spent days aligning with our stakeholders. Talking to them to understand what they needed from this project and understand what success looked like to them.

They had a list of potential problem areas and asked us to validate. The last piece we needed before we could start discovery was to understand how we were going to measure success. Establishing a benchmark up front and defining a quantitative value to measure against once we finished was an imperative. For this project, we settled on time and money saved for our KPI.Precise data they were unable to get.
Getting granular
To start, I shadowed several PCAs and APCAs all day. I recorded their screens while they went about their days. The goal of this exercise was to understand how they work, what information they need to support their practices, why they needed it, and where they look to find that information.
Yea, it's hard to see. It's becuase this thing is massive. Printed on a plotter, it's 28' long.
The 'Rosetta stone'.
I constructed a different type of journey map. After spending 8.5 hours with each of our users, I created a separate journey map to understand the PCAs flow throughout the day. The journey map included:
  • The systems they use
  • The tasks that they accomplish in each system
  • Time spent in each system
  • Time spent accomplishing tasks
  • Loading times
  • Screen shots of notable screens
  • Pain-points and pull quotes
This became our rosetta stone and a benchmark to determine time savings. Although it was a manual process, it was invaluable. Below is a small example of the map:
A very small slice from the above journey map
What we were hearing
To us [PCAs] it’s all one relationship, one client—that is, being able to see all the information about an individual client in a single place. Right now, I just don’t see everything I need to see inside of Salesforce.”
“The bulk of my time is spent in activites. I would say, I spend about 70% of my time in activities and 30% looking at all the rest of the information. Everything else is really just reference.”
The interviews
One of the crucial pieces of information we learned was that users were leveraging the activities timeline the most in Salesforce. The reason the activity timeline was so heavily utilized was it allowed them to set up tasks and events in the future, so that they could manage their practices more proactively. However, there were several issues with the timeline:
  • There was no way to quickly read comments
  • Could not see more than three upcoming tasks or events
  • It was small and off to the side
  • PCAs were using other systems to read comments in the activity timeline because it was quicker
  • Could not see more than three upcoming tasks or events
  • It required multiple steps to update the information in a task or event
"Out of the box"
This is what the Activity Timeline looks like ‘out of the box’. Using these components is always the preferred method since it’s less maintenance and less development. However, in our case, the standard Activity Timeline was under-delivering for our users
The standard Salesforce Activity Timeline
Rep expererience. Re-imagined.
A little bit of customization
First things first. We decided to customize the Activity Timeline because it was the single-most used tool accross all of our users.
A new holistic view
In addition to the Activity Timeline, we also spent considerable time using card sorts to determine what information was crucial on the right rail and in what order. We built several new components and brought additional data into Salesforce to built out a complete view of a client’s financial profile.
All the data, right where you need it.
After 8 months of talking to users almost on a daily basis, a lot of testing, iterating, dead-ends, and some hurdles, we finally deployed a massive update to the Client Profile page.
Minutes, dollars and cents.
After deployment the next step was the measure business value. Early on in the project, we knew we needed to save the business money and the users time. Both are very valuable and we were able to deliver successfully on both metrics. Below is what the total time and money savings was for this project.
group 1
17 Minutes saved
group 2
7.5 Minutes saved
calculated savings
$3M Saved
our Stakeholder
I think this redesign is the kind of thing that’s going to get people really excited!
Additional work and thoughts.
Lesson 01
Anytime you helped out a client, but also learned a lot yourself is a successful project in my mind. One of the biggest lessons I took away from this project was it is really important to learn the capabilities that a system offers, but also, it’s limitations. Salesforce does a lot well, but it also has it short-comings. For instance, creating a custom component inside Salesforce is feasible but not always the right decision. The way security models are set up in Salesforce and how they deploy updates often times leads to a lot of additional development time when creating custom components. For this reason, going forward, I will strive to use more standard components.
Lesson 02
The second lesson was more of a personal takeaway, but ties into the first lesson I learned. That is, to learn to challenge the client a little bit more. We were so focused on improving the experience inside of Salesforce, I failed to take a step back and look at the experience in it’s entirety. All of our users use two monitors and there were other, homegrown systems that Schwab was using. I think we could have leveraged both these aspects to push the solution a little bit further. This was an ‘a ha’ after looking over the holistic journey maps we created.

COMCAST

Next project
Complex Network. Simple tool.