Case Study:
Streamlining Hardship Withdrawals for a Seamless Customer Experience
Overview
Fidelity Investments is a leader in investment tools and trading platforms, offering services like 401k management to empower customers in their financial journeys.
Beyond designing cutting-edge digital products, our product design team proactively seeks opportunities to enhance the broader user experience. In this case, we tackled a critical pain point in the hardship withdrawal process, transforming a slow and frustrating ordeal into a swift, reliable solution.
The Challenge
One customer, “Sally,” faced an urgent personal emergency and qualified for a hardship withdrawal from her 401k—funds that should have reached her account in 1-3 days. Instead, due to inefficiencies in the legacy process, Sally waited two weeks for her money. After reviewing support call transcripts flagged by customer service managers as the “worst experiences” over the past year, her case stood out as a clear call to action.
Our Approach
We dug into Sally’s experience, mapping her journey to pinpoint delays and their root causes. Key findings included email alerts lost in spam folders and manager approvals languishing in queues. Armed with these insights, we took decisive steps:
SMS Alerts: Replaced unreliable email notifications with instant text messages for approvals.
Workflow UI Upgrade: Introduced real-time alerts in the manager interface to prioritize time-sensitive requests.
Validation: Conducted a focus group with customer service reps to refine our solutions.
Collaboration: Built a user journey map and wireframes, pitching the revamp to the VP of Investor Relations and VP of Product Design for joint approval.
Our Approach
We dug into Sally’s experience, mapping her journey to pinpoint delays and their root causes. Key findings included email alerts lost in spam folders and manager approvals languishing in queues. Armed with these insights, we took decisive steps:
Share the problem statement here
Concider a teaser of the final design here if not show in the hero
Process section
Discovery - Wireframing - UI design - Usability Testing (Use a graphic right here)
1.) Discovery
2.) Wireframing
3.) UI Design
4.) Usability Testing
5.) Party time!
Impact section
Show some fat success metrics and user quotes here!
25%
Improvement per user session
$157,000
Saved over time
214
Less support calls
Reflection
Learning & takeaways
What I would do differently next time
Next steps
