Case Study: Capital One Investing

Empowering Financial Advisors & Clients Through Service Design

Using service design strategy and digital tools to improve the advisor-client relationship and enhance the investing experience.

Project Overview

Role: UX & Service Design Lead

Client: Capital One Investing

Timeline: 2015-2017

Tools Used: User Interviews, Lean UX Methodology, Journey Mapping, Service Design Blueprints, Stakeholder Workshops, Figma, Miro, Salesforce Lightning

The Challenges

Capital One Investing aimed to enhance its digital tools to better support both financial advisors and potential investors. The key challenges included:

  • Advisors were burdened by outdated interfaces that slowed down client interactions.
  • Potential investors struggled with complex financial jargon and an outdated onboarding process, making the experience frustrating and unclear.
  • A fragmented system prevented seamless collaboration between advisors and clients, affecting trust and engagement.

Research & Discovery

To uncover pain points and opportunities, we conducted:

  • User Interviews with financial advisors to identify workflow inefficiencies.
  • Empathy Research with potential investors to understand overall needs and the barriers to engagement.
  • Stakeholder Workshops to align back-office processes with business goals.

Key Insights

Advisors needed better access to client information through an improved CRM, allowing for more efficient and personalized interactions.

Investors wanted expert guidance while maintaining control over decisions, relying on advisors for support without unnecessary complexity.

Both groups valued seamless interaction tools, including video chat and self-scheduling, to enhance communication and accessibility.

Strategy & Approach

Our customer experience strategy focused on:

Personas & Journey Mapping to visualize advisor and investor experiences, pain points, and opportunities.

Co-Creation Workshops to understand the current status and ideate solutions with internal teams.

Service Design Blueprints to map front-end and back-end interactions across the entire customer journey, both in-branch and online.

Solution & Execution

Enhanced Collaboration Tools:
  • Introduced DocuSign to streamline onboarding and reduce paperwork.
  • Implemented online scheduling (BookingBug) customized to suit our advisors needs, to simplify appointment management.
  • Added interactive goal-setting features to foster trust and engagement.
Salesforce Lightning Migration:
  • Led the seamless migration from the existing CMS to Salesforce Lightning.
  • Conducted design walkthroughs with developers to ensure smooth implementation.
  • Enhanced lead-tracking capabilities, improving advisor efficiency.

Impact & Results

  • Increased advisor retention due to improved workflow and success metrics.
  • Higher investor sign-ups and improved satisfaction with the digital experience.
  • Boost in user confidence, reflected in stronger trust and engagement scores.

Key Learnings

  • Balancing simplicity with depth was essential to serve both advisors and investors effectively.
  • Early user testing helped avoid costly redesigns and ensured stakeholder alignment.
  • Service design blueprints provided a clear picture of system interactions, highlighting risks and opportunities for product development.
  • Human-centered language was critical in making financial products more approachable and trustworthy.

Conclusion & Next Steps

This project demonstrated how a service design approach could bridge the gap between business needs and user experience.

By leveraging UX research tools effectively, we improved both the advisor-client relationship and the overall investing journey. The success of this initiative reinforced the importance of designing with the full ecosystem in mind—from internal operations to customer interactions.