Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: They’re all mobile but because of the form factor differences, usage models and usage packages tend to be different.

Mark McCormick: So, imagine how complicated my job is.

SM: Yes.

MM: We have to experiment and be always ahead of not just those form factors but the different interaction modes, the gestural modes. Gestural language is something that we had to figure out. The next thing we’ll have to figure out is voice.

SM: If I’m a Wells Fargo customer interacting with the Wells Fargo online system when I’m on my iPhone, would I be interacting through an app?

MM: Both. There are app versions and browser versions of our site for tablet and mobile. Some customers prefer to access WellsFargo.com through their browsers on their smart phones. Some customers choose to download the app. We try to provide a fairly consistent experience between those things. When we do a native app like for smart phones, it allows us to take advantage of capabilities that are only available through that smart phone technology. As a side note, I should have one more way that people interact with us and that’s through SMS- or text-based banking. That’s been a successful, hugely popular offering of ours.

The native environments allow us to take advantage of technologies that are available to smart phones, which are things like the camera and geo location awareness features.

SM: You started to mention voice as an interface. Have you started playing with Siri as a way to interact with your application?

MM: Not yet, but that’s the sort of thing that we would take into our lab. We have a very active lab program, and that’s where we foster a culture of innovation, inventiveness and tinkering. We sometimes take a lot of things – not unlike the Google labs – into our own lab and ask ourselves what we can do and what is possible. That allows us to test and learn with small audiences, just employees, and then pilot audiences and that sort of thing, using real data. We haven’t done anything with voice yet but we could have this conversation later, and I could tell you yes, we’ve started that experiment. Don’t you think it’s something that we’re going to need to pay attention to?

SM: Well, I’m not sure if that’s absolutely necessary. Do I need to interact with my online banking system through voice? Do I need to do this hands free while I’m in the car? Not really. It’s just that when technology becomes available, people tend to come up with innovative ways of using that. I don’t claim to be an expert in what consumers want. Who ever thought that Instagram was going to be such a big deal? I didn’t find it to be a big deal, but it is a big deal.

MM: You’re bringing up an interesting point. It’s kind of how we design. We first have to ask ourselves, who is the customer, so that’s why we work with personas and archetypes of our typical customers. If we just listen to ourselves – product managers, designers and technologists sitting around a table and imagining what customers want – we wouldn’t be successful. But we have personas that, for example, represent our youngest customers, customers who are just starting out. They’re far more technically savvy than a lot of us. So, we ask ourselves what they may want in two, three, four, or five years. I do believe there will come a day when you could pick up your phone and say, “Go to Wells Fargo, and log me in by my voice imprint, and transfer $100 to Beverly Butler.” She would be on a list of contacts I had, and it would be just as simple as that. Authentication could happen through your voice print, and you could do it just by speaking.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo
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