Customer-Centric While Driving Business Outcomes

CI&T Helps First Hawaiian Bank Personalize their Customer Experience

Situation

Companies worldwide accelerated their focus on digital customer experience in 2020, a long-overdue shift for industries with little distinction. Given that 87% of banking customers who increased their use of digital channels during the pandemic intended to keep the habit¹, revealed a clear business imperative for ongoing investments in the space. First Hawaiian Bank took a solid first step by adopting advanced Acquia Cloud and Site Studio (low-code) and Agile One (personalization) technologies, then turned to the financial services experts at CI&T to help maximize their new investment.

Challenges

How to be customer-centric while focusing on objectives such as new account growth. CI&T had to establish trust and overcome many obstacles. Prior painful 12- to 24-month transformation processes make organizations hesitant to launch a major, costly, time-consuming update — even if their current system no longer provides an optimal customer experience. Because of its location, First Hawaiian Bank had to meet the needs of both locals and international business visitors. Furthermore, First Hawaiian’s in-house team was not staffed to handle the technical requirements of the new web platform.

Solutions

CI&T brought deep knowledge of customer needs based on their understanding of retail, small business, commercial, and wealth management user journeys within banking. To ensure a meaningful experience, CI&T started by unifying 70+ internal stakeholders. On the customer side of the project, CI&T helped identify personas and devised a strategy to improve connections with each persona through context-appropriate content. To determine where personalization was needed and where efficiencies of scale could be achieved, the team asked one more question: If we personalize this element, does it make a better or more efficient sales and service engine?

With the right site structure in place, the next step was to apply the element of technology to build and curate these new experiences. Using CI&T's agile sprint model in conjunction with low-code Acquia technology (Cohesion), an MVP was completed in three months, with a version two to follow seven months later. Instead of a typical two-year cycle, CI&T was able to get a functioning website in the hands of users and customers in under 10 months.

Results

Because the MVP was completed quickly, the rest of the transformational process had executive buy-in and support. CI&T laid the groundwork for the in-house team to handle ongoing site optimization, working with them to promote understanding throughout the process. To manage and evolve First Hawaiian Bank's digital customer experience, CI&T proposed new business and technology roles. Metrics for the new site signal success, with an 80% reduction in bounce rate and 29% increase in time spent in session.

Reality

Reimagining and reshaping the digital customer experience does not have to be a painful, drawn-out operation. By applying the right processes and technology, organizations no longer need to get to a breaking point before they undertake improvements. Even major transformations can be accomplished in a way that unites shareholders, enables a faster rate of return, and strengthens customer loyalty through better, more personal service.

“For our approach, we set up an MVP structure to prove that by prioritizing key elements and using low code, we could build elements of the new site quickly and show tangible results. Stakeholder mindsets changed very rapidly from theoretical understanding to real-world buy-in, resulting in increased engagement and an immediate shift in working model that allowed us to partner and make this evolution together.”

Robin Borelli - Head of Financial Services Practice CI&T

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