The challenge

U.S. Bank is the fifth-largest U.S. commercial bank, operating in more than 3,100 banking offices and holding more than $419 billion in assets. Their 73,000 employees work across departments to help their 18 million customers turn their dreams into reality. Most importantly, they put people first, cultivating and treasuring meaningful relationships with the customers they serve, the colleagues they support and the communities where they live and work.

US Bank was growing too fast to adequately support their staff. So they brought in Blue Sequoyah Technologies to analyze their support infrastructure, make recommendations, and build a prototype.

It was clear that their support group needed help. Not only was the bank growing rapidly by absorbing other banks, staff turnover caused by rapid growth made it even more difficult to do their job. They needed more automation. They needed bank employees to be able to get help without a phone call.

It was a real challenge to keep their Knowledge Center up-to-date with the most accurate information as new banks were being absorbed into the company, and their authoritative content had to be combed, processed and merged into a single library.

Aside from all the technical challenges, US Bank already had a great "people first" culture. This had to be maintained during mergers, as well as with any recommended platform changes.

US Bank

Industry

  • Banking and financial

Project timeline

  • 12 months to prototype

Blue Sequoyah Technologies services

  • API integrations
  • Bandwidth and traffic analysis
  • Gap analysis
  • Github source code repository management
  • Technical research, consulting
  • Rapid prototyping
  • Responsive markup with SCSS
  • Server security audit
  • User experience strategy and design
  • User interface design
  • Web app hosting

The result

In phase 1 we had the goal of creating a report with our findings and a high-level recommendation. We started by interviewing lots of people, beginning with corporate staff, to understand what was required of various roles and where the gaps were. We then traveled across the country to interview people working throughout US Bank, from tellers to regional managers. Aside from performing in-person interviews, surveys, and card sorting exercises, we did telephone interviews and built a card sorting app so more of their staff could show us how they model information, share their concerns, and tell us what works well. We also performed a content analysis of all their authoritative resources, like operating procedures.

We then created a phase 1 report, which was a 105-page book with a ton a great information about where they were as a company, what they did well, what needed improvement, what the industry is doing, and a plan for decades to come.

In phase 2 we acted on the plan from phase 1 by researching and building a prototype and gathering feedback. This included a phase 2 book of findings, which was 106 pages in length.

At the core of our recommendation was a restructuring of their authoritative content, like operating procedures, and being able to find that content quickly.

To that end, for the prototype we recommended using a product named Stardog to provide ontologies as the foundation of their new information architecture. On top of that we would build out a content management system and replace their Intranet with new resources targeted at all of our findings in phase 1. This would allow personnel to self-help, and give them a better experience. It would also consolidate corporate communication and maintain their unique culture.

Summary

  • Support content analysis
  • User interviews, surveys, and mental model exercises, both in-person and with digital tools
  • 105-page analysis report
  • 106-page recommendations report
  • Prototype intranet Knowledge Center built with ASP.NET and Stardog

ROI

  • Improved findability: 92%
  • Improved value: 94%
  • Overall user acceptance: 94%