How TD’s Design Team Brings Great Experiences to Market Faster

Experience is everything when it comes to banking today. Customers not only expect convenience and personalization, they want banks to understand the human side of financial decisions and guide them through important moments, like leaving home and starting their first job or saving to buy a home. And as customer interactions increasingly happen through many varying touchpoints, banks are also focused on designing better customer experiences.

TD, one of the world’s leading banks, is designing meaningful experiences to build financial confidence and ensure its millions of customers across North America are banking with ease.

TD is focused on meeting the evolving needs of customers and adapting to meet industry changes.

A wealth of design talent

TD has created an in-house design team known as DCX (Digital Customer Experience) where designers work on new ways to delight employees and customers. The team spans across North America and is immersed in TD’s strategy, people, and processes, and relies on industry-leading creative tools to bring their ideas to life. The design team focuses on delivering consistent, high-quality products and services, including new kinds of customer experiences that put a human touch on banking—from employee intranets and chat bots to voice based interfaces.

For example, the TD MySpend app available for Canadian customers, gives customers real-time visibility into their spending, making it simple for them to monitor and track their spending. TD MySpend makes it easy for them to understand their spending habits and celebrate their victories, without requiring them to enter cumbersome data.

Investing in design

Good design has played a big role in the evolution of TD’s customer experiences. The design team researches customer challenges, immersing themselves in the field to observe how customer experiences play out. From there, a diverse team, including product owners, designers, copywriters, subject matter experts, and customers come together. Design thinking workshops also help the teams identify customer challenges and find new ways to address them.

According to Imran Khan, head of digital customer experience at TD, “Design thinking is fueling new ideas and solutions. By identifying the root of customer problems, we can put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and explore new ways to reimagine how we engage with them.”

Taking a new approach to deliver great experiences

Meeting customer needs and expectations requires new ways of working. TD is increasingly embracing new ways to design and prototype customer experiences, allowing the design team to bring their ideas—and ultimately, better customer experiences—to market faster. The design team adopted Adobe Creative Cloud, specifically Adobe XD, to give employees the agility to respond to customer needs and expectations rapidly. Adobe XD has helped TD improve collaboration and streamline hand-off between designers and developers. Rather than working with a static file or wireframe, designers share a single, dynamic prototype link with developers that captures specs, comments, and changes to keep everyone working with the latest version.

This was especially helpful when DCX redesigned TD’s U.S. web and mobile platforms to make the experience and design more consistent across the platforms, which the team considers one of its greatest successes. Using Adobe XD has also helped designers stay aligned across the border. Eric Kaiser, a service design director for DCX says, “We have an enterprise design standard and our strategy is to align our digital properties in the U.S. and Canada. Adobe XD helps us share designs and foster a one-TD Bank approach.”

Creating real experiences, for real people

Empathy also plays a critical role. Designers look for experiences and opportunities that will make a difference for customers and help them feel good about their financial decisions. It’s about designing with a lens into people’s lives, providing useful advice like using a refund to pay down their mortgage more quickly or having a rainy-day fund to offset unexpected expenses.

“What makes TD unique is that we start with design,” says Khan. “We’re willing to try new things, experiment, and explore to get to the right experience for our customers. We want to empower them to be confident about their financial future, and TD has the reach and the talent to do that.”

In addition to Adobe Creative Cloud, as part of TD’s approach to drive connected customer experiences and become a true Customer Experience Management institution, they also use Adobe Experience Cloud, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target.