Connecting Experience Design and Business Outcomes: Jason Ferrell, Capital One

The Gist

• Innovation focus. Personalization in product design drives brand growth.
• Balancing act. Customization and scalability must be balanced for companywide capabilities for personalized experiences.
• Cross-functionality crucial. Cross-functional teams enhance problem-solving and customer-focused product development.
• Business-design link. Linking design choices to business dynamics is essential for effective decision-making.

This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio.

Dom Nicastro: Hello, everybody, Dom Nicastro here from CMSWire and CX Decoded. I'm the managing editor of CMS wire and we're opening up Season Four today with a bang. We've got Capital One's managing vice president of experience design Jason Ferrell. Jason, how's it going today?

Jason Ferrell: Great, Dom, how are you? 

Dom: Good, good. We're gonna get into the topic of experience design, you know what that means for customers, what that means for product design, how you work with internal teams. Huge topic. But Forget all that. Let's talk about Jason for a second, what's going on? What's up? What do you bring to the table, give me a fun fact about you not related to work,

Jason: And happy to do that, great fact, and just happened recently. So my husband and I have owned for the past 15 years a bakery, and sold it last week. This was a concept we started from scratch, 15 years ago. It's been an amazing ride. We had a chance to work with some amazing people and do some really fun things in the community. And now we're passing the torch to another entrepreneur, a couple as well, who I know will take the brand to new heights.

Dom: That's a fun fact. What was the bakery called? 

Jason: Yeah, it's called Frostings Bake Shop. And so it will still live on. We're sad to see it go but excited to see what they'll do with it.

Dom: That wins me over in a second. You just hit the jackpot for marketing with Dom Nicastro. Because I'm a frosting guy through and through. You know, those people that leave frosting and just eat the cake. I'm like, Hey, what are you doing? Give me that plate. Let's go to tackling. I'm in. Well, that's an awesome, fun fact. I love it. And let's segue into you know, the working world. So we said managing vice president of experience design Capital One, how did you get in that role? Like what's the evolution of Jason's ascension into the financial industry and the role you're in now?

Jason: Yeah, so the common thread for me and my, really, my career, but I can see it now back to even the interest I had when I was a child is I've always been interested in what makes people tick. And when I was a kid, I really focused on journalism. My outlet was the school newspaper.

Nicastro: Same: 

Ferrell: Yeah, I thought I was gonna go into broadcast journalism, and then pivoted in undergrad to business and found that I could apply my innate curiosity in marketing. And so my origin and design is really through research. And I'll speed ahead just to kind of say, when design was established as a real core job discipline at Capital One that corresponded with our technology transformation when we realized we needed to really like rebuild the entire infrastructure of how the company ran, we recognized that we needed to invest in disciplines like product management, and data science and design was one of them. 

I had been at the company already and found my lean and research was really the application of insights on the customer experience. And so I got a chance to be a part of building the design team from scratch when we started here. And it's been a fascinating ride, to build a new discipline and do that amidst a very mature company and mature business practices and already at scale. And so now for the past nine years, we've been educating internal partners and stakeholders on how design can help move the business forward. So today, my focus is on our consumer credit card business, our premium product segment and our retail bank.

Dom: I love the paths of CX people in marketing people because they're never the same. They're never the same. It's like a lawyer takes the bar passes it, goes to work. NFL quarterback, awesome in high school, scouted drafted, goes to work, CX people in marketing. It's like, Hey, I was an architect to start or I was a math teacher. It's just fascinating. Where you folks come from?

Jason: I totally agree. And I try to remind the team about that a lot. Because I think the diversity in our backgrounds is actually one of the things that really makes us a strong unit. We all have different paths. But the common thread across all of us is that we just love to solve problems for people. And that usually is the motivation that drives decisions that led us here. And so there's a lot of power in the diversity of the team and I tried to harness it.

Personalization in UI Design

Dom: Yeah. And I think CX people, marketing people, journalists like me, I think we love the fact that there's no right or wrong answer. There's no math equation, right? It's just like, No, you have to design this credit card this way. Like no, you can be creative and everything. I love it. Jason, thanks for giving us the lay of the land there on you professionally, personally, so fun to meet you. So we're going to break down this conversation of experience design into kind of like four buckets. We're going to start with personalization in product design and team dynamics, then we're going to move on to art and science of personalization, leveraging cross functional teams, and connecting experience and business outcomes. So it's all gonna be woven together, kind of in those four buckets. So are you ready? Let's do it. I am OK, let's go. So let's start with topic number one, Jason, personalization and product design and team dynamics. Could you share some examples of how Capital One has incorporated personalization in its product design, and team dynamics kind of enhance brand growth, and ultimately drive customer loyalty?

Jason: You know, the area of our businesses that makes me think about are some recent innovations we've been doing in the travel market. So a few years ago, we launched some new credit card products and very core to the value proposition of that product is playing a role in travel. So customers earn rewards miles. And we know that customers love to use those for travel. And it's sort of been an industry expectation that in this part of the rewards credit card market, that you had some travel portal where you could actually facilitate travel booking for customers, but it was always a bolt on. And we knew if we were going to get into this part of the market, we needed to do it differently. And we were going to do it in a way that is really core to the DNA of how the company runs, and we're able to connect it to your prompt around personalization. 

So to me, personalization is really about understanding our customers, and what they need and what their context is, and how do we fit into their life. And when we looked at the way the industry had, the way the credit card industry had been playing, and in travel, it was, it just wasn't anything that we wanted to replicate. And so we actually went a different route, entered an agreement with Hopper as a partner to help us reimagine what a credit card being in the travel game looks like. And what was so critical about that, and when we thought about what product werel we actually going to design? And how would we use some of Hopper’s leading technology? The question came back to well, what are our customers’ needs, and where are the pain points and travel and travel is this really interesting tension where for most of us, it represents a source of joy. And it evokes something very, very positive, when we are planning what we want to, where we want to go and who we're going to go with and the experiences that we'll have. 

But then the flip side is the actual executing of it can be quite a drag, it can be hard to know, if you're getting the best deal, you can find yourself in this paralysis state. Because there's so many alternatives in terms of how you can search for destinations and ways to get there and how you're often doing that with people and how you share this part of the journey, which is planning. And that led to the product that we built, having some really, really core features like price watch guarantees, and price freezes, and things that took some of the hesitation and frustration out of just the planning part of travel alone, how we built the UI kind of stripping it away from all of the industry practices on upsells, and cross sells and barraging you with information in the moment with a very kind of simple and elegant UI that starts with Where do you want to go? And when are you going? So we approached it really differently. All of it laddering back to what we felt people wanted and what they need when they're at the beginning of their travel journey.

Related Article: How UX Design Customer Metrics Can Improve Customer Experience

Balancing Customization and Scalability in Product Design

Dom: I love those two questions. Where do you want to go? And when are you going? That's what's on all of our minds, when we start thinking about the possibility of a nice vacation, whether it's with a big family, whether it's just one couple alone, what have you, it's like, what and when am I going? Where am I going? That's right. And it's so nice to have that actually, you know, can you jump back one sec, and kind of explain a little more on what Hopper is that integration just in case? Someone's not totally familiar with that?

Jason: Yeah, so Hopper is a third party that helps facilitate a lot of the product that we built for the Capital One customer to use.

Dom: All right, cool. Now moving on, in the whole context of personalization, have you seen the balance between customization and scalability playing out in your whole product design efforts?

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Like there are two things that that make me think about first is a company with the scale that Capital One has, it's really important from a platform perspective that we have capabilities that enable us to meet the needs of multiple segments and sub segments of the marketplace and can do that through share channels. So, for instance, the experience you might have with our mobile app might actually be a little bit different than the one that I have, because it's unique to the products that we each have with Capital One. So we've spent and obsessed a lot about what are the underlying capabilities across the company that enable each individual to feel like they're having a personalized experience with us. And then, when you've done that, from a platform perspective, then the various businesses can bring to bear a deep understanding of the customer and the businesses that we're trying to be in and leverage the capabilities that exist from an enterprise perspective.

Related Article: 3 Ways Ecommerce Brands Can Use AI for Personalization

Key Metrics for Measuring Success in Personalization Strategie

Dom: It always comes back to metrics and KPIs too, right? Like, what are those specific metrics that you use to actually measure the success in personalization? You know, because we're, as a media company, you know, we're always doing things behind the scenes, right? We're trying to SEO up the story. At the end of the day, we got to say, all right, how do we do? And it's engagement, it's user reviews, it's duration on the page for us? What kind of metrics Are you focused on day to day?

Jason: There are a lot of similar ones. I mean, every business and every product might have its own unique KPIs based on the nature of what the product is and how customers use it. But it's going to be very familiar things like are users able to complete the tasks that they're attempting with us. We obsess about how long that might take, and how frequently do they reach error states? And when and what happens when they do? Where do they go? And how do we ensure that we're ultimately ensuring that task completion happens. And a lot of ways some of the very core like usability measures that many industries focus on, you know, this isn't just unique to design and financial services, but are ones that the design team is going to obsess about. And really like I think our role from a design perspective is ensuring that the business doesn't just think about them as design metrics, but that they are core business metrics, just like each business might have its own unique view into revenue and operating expenses. Like, I think our most mature state is when we're looking at all of these aspects of the business that we're in, in one place and in one dashboard, and reviewing them together.

Related Article: Finding the Goldilocks Zone of Marketing Measurement

Leading Experience Design Teams Through Failed Metrics and Quick Pivots

Dom: You know, you're working with this team of designers that are on your team that report to you, when a metric comes in to slap you in the face and says this didn't work. Like at that moment as a leader in experience design, like what's the message to the team, because you must feel so good. When you release the change, you release the UI, you release the new product, and you're like, This is gonna be awesome. And then your metrics say, No, it's not. At that moment, how do you rally the troops,

Jason: Most of the work that we do is digital. And we are so fortunate to get to apply experience design in a digital context because of how fast you can pivot and experiment. So I think it's really important to have a growth mindset, particularly when we're trying something new, where we don't have a whole lot of exposure to how something is going to perform, or a lot of best practices in terms of maybe how to design it from scratch, and things of that nature. So it's an input. And then what's most important is in how quickly do we pivot? What do we learn from it? And then how do we ensure that learning then reaches others who might be on the same path just maybe a little bit further behind? And really, that's a growth mindset and design. But I think it's actually a mindset that the company has, and really embraces. Capital One has always been on the forefront of experimentation and creating value where it didn't exist. And you know, you're not always going to get that right. Right off the bat.

Dom: Yeah, and the word that comes up for me when you're talking through that is agile, right? being agile, having agility in the actual, do you actually run agile teams and sprints and all that good stuff do?

Jason: Yeah, we do. And a lot of the work that the design team does, happens inside the agile context. And there's a lot of discovery work that might happen outside of it and informs it. But yeah, it's critical for teams developing software to have both the mindset and the operating model that enable us to move fast and respond to things in the real world. The other thing that I would say is how we set up tests and roll experiences out and learn from them. In smaller, isolated environments. For instance, you know, the picture you were painting in terms of something not going as you might think it would, that's a lot less impactful if you're experimenting with 1% population than a full scale rollout. So how we go to market also impacts things of that nature.

Balancing Art and Science in Experience Design for Customer Engagement

Dom: Let's move on to the art and science of personalization. So when I say that art and science, it's, you know, it's, it's thrown out a lot and we were kind of alluding to it now with data versus design and all that but when I say that to you, as an experienced design leader, what does that mean to you when you're trying to balance art and science with your teams?

Jason: Sometimes the art can be a way to just think about the deep consumer understanding in that customer context, what we might refer to as the mental model that the user has about whatever problem space we're working at. So I gave an example of our entering the travel business a few years ago, deeply understanding that customer journey and where all the pain points are, put us in a position to chip away at those potential painpoints through sometimes seemingly like small details in a UI, like a design choice about how a button works, or how the app responds to the user moving through a flow, for instance, like, there are ways that we can match what the user is experiencing to the context and the way they are likely thinking about it, when they're engaging with it, all of that there's an art to, and a lot of times, you can't put your finger on it, you can't run it through a formula, like you were saying earlier, it's about creative problem solving and finding ways to evoke connection. And that can be really hard to do when our customers are interacting with something digital that we built, and not another human, it's really bringing that human nature and human likeness to the digital experience.

Managing Data Privacy in Experience Design Amid Industry Regulations

Dom: Yeah, when I think of science in the context of what you're talking about, I also my mind goes down the road of of data analytics and privacy to that must be a huge challenge. Or maybe it's not maybe maybe your team's embrace the privacy aspect that is, you know, become so paramount in the last few years, especially with with things like that happened in California, GDPR, in the financial industry has always been challenged by the compliance and privacy aspect of things when you're dealing with money. So that's right. When design meets privacy, you know, what does that mean for your teams? Is it does it hold back some some initiatives or just your team's embrace it?

Jason: I think we embrace it, particularly when you think about the role that legislation plays in protecting consumers. That's an example where those incentives are actually aligned with ours as a company, we take our customers’ privacy very seriously, we take protecting their data very seriously. So the fact that regulations exist, that dictate how we navigate certain situations and what we're held accountable to, we embrace those because what's good for the customer, we believe it's going to be good for us.

Related Article: 3 Ways AI-Powered Predictive Analytics Are Transforming Ecommerce

The Role of User Experience and Security in Product Design Decisions

Dom: Yeah, reminds me of a experience I had last night trying to get my son a new phone, because he drops his in the ocean, because he doesn't realize that you can't take phones in the ocean. And we went to a store that you know, has a big like piece of fruit hanging over it. And you gotta go in and you talk to these cool people. Yeah, and we could not get a new phone because we are ready to pay, we're ready to do everything. We could not do it because we couldn't turn off a feature called Find My iPhone. And it was pretty frustrating, you know, because I was — we were ready to rock. And he forgot his password. And it was a big deal. And I said, you know, and I was talking through this, with the nice rep was explaining it very nicely to me. And clearly. And I said, this is where security meets experience, you know, because Apple values security greatly. Security and privacy. And I don't, I just want my get my son to do her own at that moment. It's such good examples of trade offs that companies make between security, privacy and experience that it sounds like your teams are kind of just embracing it all, as all very important pillars of experience design.

Jason: That's right. And it makes me think of how important it is to design for so many different aspects of how an experience can go. So it's easy to think about what you know, I might refer to as the happy path, and what your experience should have been getting the new phone, but I think it's the designers job really to think around like, what other turns might the customer take when trying to accomplish this task? What will they run into? And what are we going to do if that happens, and really thinking through those various scenarios and being very intentional about the path that ultimately helps to ensure that you're able to achieve what you're trying to do.

Related Article: The Role of Data Privacy in Customer Trust and Brand Loyalty

Leveraging Cross-Functional Teams for Customer-Centric Product Development

Dom: By the way, I like dropped my job when I was talking to that rep. Like, by the way, I'm a managing editor for a website that covers customer experience. That's why I know so much about this right? He wasn't impressed. He wasn't there. All right. And that takes us to topic number three, leveraging cross functional teams. We were talking about your team a little bit and what they value. And I think a lot of folks out there like okay, how do they get the job done? How do they do this? The cross functional team teams, that's a big part of this big part of your world, diving across different departments and figuring things out as a complete and utter whole unit. So the question would be like, what are some examples of leveraging the knowledge of a cross functional effort in addressing specific customer needs through that path.

Jason: I’m a huge believer in the power of cross functional teams and the proverbial wisdom of the crowd. And that's just a core to how Capital One operates. In software development, we often refer to the trifecta of product design and technology. I think that is actually much more complex than that, I think data science and marketing and operations and strategy, all coming to the table to helping achieve an objective is where I've seen this have the most success. Frankly, a few years ago, we were rethinking what it's like to be on boarded to a new credit card product. And we were really ready to tackle that because the nature of how people spend money has changed. Credit card companies used to really compete to be top of wallet. And that was almost like a literal meaning, that card most accessible in your wallet. 

Well, you think about how the world has changed and how many transactions how much spending you do relative how many times you touch your credit card. Spending. Now being top of wallet takes on a whole different meaning. It's about your card being embedded in your web browser, it's being in your digital wallets. So the job that customers are really trying to do when they get new cards, is now integrate this new product into their life into their spending life. And so how our experience work needed to facilitate that. It's not enough just to get you a physical card in your mailbox, but really help you embed the card in a digital context. So that was really the challenge that we are tackling. And what we found that we needed to do was engage numerous teams from very different parts of the company to come together. 

Enterprise teams that are focused on consumer identity and protecting customer data and fraud teams who you know, helped to make sure that our customers money is safe and help where we make decisions about the legitimacy of transactions and accounts, the business teams, teams that run multiple channels of how we engage with customers, I mean, the count was probably half a dozen or higher of teams that had to come together within their own trifectas of how they work. What I found really is most critical when you recognize just how many teams are required to work together is you can't move too fast through setting the vision and getting people rallied around what we're trying to accomplish and bought into the purpose. That can't be something someone else does, and then brings over and expects everyone to fall in line like everyone needs to sort of be a part of shaping that you create a real vested interest and a common purpose that binds this very kind of massive cross functional team.

Cross-Departmental Collaboration Varies with Product Lifecycle Stages

Dom: So if I were looking in your inbox, which cross department organization, and within Capital One would be taking up the most space, marketing, sales like, or is it a tie between a bunch of them?

Jason: Yeah, it's an interesting question. I would say, it sort of depends on the context. So to the extent we are engaging, and asking questions like, Hey, where's this business going? In three years? And how do we need to be thinking about the customer experience in a way that future proofs, the business, you know, you might have corporate strategy teams heavily engaged and running that in partnership with the business. And then in another context, it could be, hey, we've built this awesome travel product, and we're about to go to market and that might have a heavy marketing lean to it, along with the business and product team. So I think I would find that the composition and mix of cross functional collaboration might evolve based on where we are in the product development lifecycle.

CX and EX: How Employee Experience Shapes Product Design

Dom: Yeah, and as you're talking through that, I'm thinking you know, a lot of experienced design leaders have CX and EX under their title. So employee experience and customer experience. Where does employee experience come into experience design? How closely are you thinking of employees with the tools they use your team uses? And even to the extent of are you working even with someone like a chief people officer or HR leader?

Jason: Great question. I'm really proud of the investment the Capital One makes in the associate experience the design team here is deeply engaged in multiple partnerships that are advancing differently, aspects of the the associate experience. So one in particular is really focused on our software engineers, who, by the way, are engaged everywhere across the product development lifecycle, helping to shape things as and certainly to delivering them. But there's such a critical job function that we're very focused on, do we have the optimal experience for that kind of work, and how to make the developers’ experience better. And then that sits alongside partnerships with our Human Resources area, who are obsessing about what it's like to become an associate, and how to integrate and acclimate to this new environment, how to get set up in systems fast, so that you can feel like you're productive as early as possible. So when I zoom all the way out and look at all the things that the design team here is touching, many of them are focused on aspects of the associate experience,

Empowering Agents: Aligning Call Center Tech With Customer Needs

Dom: The good CX companies have to walk the walk with EX too, right? I think?

Jason: That couldn't be more true in the early days of our technology transformation, which has really been to rebuild and modernize how the company runs. Part of the legacy technology that we tackled was actually how the call center agent, or a branch or cafe ambassador, all the tools that they had to use to facilitate interactions with our customers that they're having face to face. And they were navigating numerous systems to do their job. And we recognize that their primary focus needed to be on what the customer on the other side of that phone call or on the other side of that desk needed. And we needed the software and the tools that they're using to do their job to facilitate that to enable that. So we rebuilt many systems that they used and collapsed them and really focused on making their lives easier, so they could focus on our customer.

Related Article: Top Call Center Technology Trends

Design's Bottom Line: Linking Improvements to Business Outcomes

Dom: All right, that was topic three, talking about leveraging cross functional teams, let's move on to the final topic here, kind of bringing it all home and we're talking about the very fun topic of business outcomes, you know, the things that the board members ask you about? Can you talk about, you know, the impact of all these design improvements that you're constantly working on day to day, the impact of these improvements on business results? You know, what's top of mind for that? And kind of like the key metrics or indicators you look for when it comes to, hey, which business objective are we meeting right here right now?

Jason: I love that you're asking this question, because it's so central to my philosophy for how I lead the design team. And what I think is a really important challenge facing design as an industry, I think it's critical that designers understand the connection between what they're working on, and the choices they make, about how something should work or how something should be designed. And the connection it has to the underlying business dynamics at play. Sometimes that's about driving revenue, through deeper engagement with the company, sometimes that's making the cost structure that it takes to deliver experiences more efficient, whatever it is understanding the business dynamics at play, not to the degree that you are a business analyst, we're not asking that it's about having kind of a sufficient understanding about the relationship. Because design meetings are so much more powerful and effective with business leaders, when you're talking about like C-suite and our board, when you make very clear the connection between the decisions, maybe as something as detailed as how a screen is compiled, and the intentionality between that back to the underlying business dynamics. And oftentimes, I find that these connections exist, and it's just about highlighting them. And being intentional about that being as top of mind or how we communicate the great work that we're doing.

Core Principles in Experience Design 

Dom: So I'd love to just bring this all home. And I always like to ask like, hey, getting started, what's the message to someone who's pretty new at experience design? And they just got named that role? They're building their team? What are the core principles that apply to Capital One? Or the bakery? How about that and bring it a tie in death? Down the street? What are the core principles to be thinking about when it comes to experience design bringing this all together?

Jason: Yeah, I mean, I think I would pick up where we were just leaving off I think having a real understanding for the relationship between the experience which is what you're setting out to be accountable for and to be the thing that you're obsessing about, while other folks may be focused on other parts of the business, but understanding the relationship between the experience and other domains, so the relationship to the business the relationship Up to the choices the engineering teams might be facing about what systems to invest in, and what capabilities to build or not. There's also a best practice of the empathy that we apply to our end users, whether those are associates or end customers. I think applying that to internal partners is also a powerful understanding in your stakeholder ecosystem, whatever you're doing, everyone has things that are accountable to are largely everybody's trying to do their best. And really understanding where people are coming from. And applying that power of understanding and putting yourself in someone else's shoes is critically important to apply internally, particularly when you're new to a role and one of design superpowers is creating alignment and facilitation across multiple areas towards a common goal. And I think focusing on the big problems that are ahead — that’s where there's a bunch of customer pain or a bunch of business upside, and just ruthlessly prioritizing and applying those skills is where you can have the most impact.

Dom: And to top this all off, no pun intended, what's the best cake combo from a professional baker? I'll tell you mine in a second. But what is hands down your go to type of cake type of frosting?

Jason: You know, as much as I would love to be on the leading edge of this answer, for me, red velvet, and cream cheese is what it's always going to come back to.

Dom: That's the goat for you. That's the greatest of all time. Classic now brings me back to my childhood when my parents would come home from a wedding. And bring the classic white and white. 

Jason: Oh, wedding cake. Love that — nostalgic.

Dom: Love that. That's where my mind goes. Jason, you've been incredibly gracious with your time. I want to do one more thing. Where can listeners best follow you or Capital One going forward?

Jason: We're very active on many of the social media outlets on LinkedIn in particular, you can find perspectives that are important to us from a technology or marketing standpoint, on pretty much any of your social media channels of choice. Capital One is present and we're constantly sharing some of the innovations we're bringing to market.

Dom: Sweet Jason can't thank you and Capital One enough for your time today. Letting us into your world of experience design your teams, how they collaborate and how you get results in personalized experiences for customers and prospects. We thank you so much for joining us on CX Decoded Yeah, Season Four, Episode One in the books. Thanks so much, Jason. 

Jason: All right, bye

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