Understanding customer needs in financial products

Our client wanted to understand consumers’ core concerns and needs when choosing financial products, in particular protection, investments, pensions and equity release and which one are genuine drivers of brand choice.

However rather than looking at the 3 product separately and different stages of the journey separately, they wanted to see which aspects were the same and which different across these different contexts to drive propositions going forward.

The Challenge

Our client ran a number of different tracking studies across different parts of the business/products at different stages of the journey, each identifying different consumer needs.

They needed one holistic picture of the key needs & priorities for consumers within each of the 3 core product areas – long-term savings & investments, retirement lending & income (equity release & drawdown) & protection markets & across different touch points selection/renewal & experience to guide acquisition & retention.

Our approach

We ran a 2-stage approach – qualitative  & quantitative

A large qual stage of telephone interviews lasting 60 minutes to explore in detail the journeys consumers took and what was important to them

An online survey of 500 consumers in these 3 markets to quantity relative importance of drivers & sub-drivers & identify any product-specific drivers & differences between journey stages.

The outcome

We found 6 core drivers of selection including trust, convenience, suitability and an understanding of the sub-drivers of these top drivers. The client was given deeper understanding of the differences by different product customer types – for example drivers differed for those at/approaching retirement compared to investing or protecting earlier in life.

One of the key outputs of the research was a hierarchy of needs model (provided in excel) to give an understanding of the top drivers of any product/journey stage combination so different parts of the business could use the findings to understand their own target customers.