To Fix Your Customer Experience, First Fix Your Employee's Tools.
This is the story of proving a fundamental business truth. A broken employee experience will always lead to a broken customer experience. We built the capabilities to prove it.The Challenge
Most companies trying to improve their customer experience make a critical mistake, they only look at the shiny, customer-facing app or website. They completely ignore the tangled web of clunky, outdated internal tools their own employees are forced to fight with every day to serve those customers. An employee struggling with a poorly designed system cannot possibly deliver a seamless experience.
When I joined Fifth Third Bank, I saw this exact pattern. There was a genuine desire to be customer-centric, but the very people on the front lines opening accounts, resolving issues, and managing relationships were being hamstrung by their tools. Leadership had decided to tackle this problem at its root.
The Mission Was Clear
My mission was to build a foundational capability to put those internal tools under the microscope and prove that investing in the employee experience (EX) is one of the most direct and powerful levers you can pull to improve the customer experience (CX).
Build an Asset, Not an Expense
We created the business case to redirect the significant funds the bank was spending on external marketing firms for testing. The mission was to stop renting insights and build a permanent, in-house testing lab in the IT building that would pay for itself in a matter of months.
Establish a New Standard
A lab is useless without a process. A key part of my role was to establish the operational playbook for the new facility. I was hands-on in defining our best practices, setting up the technology, and creating the training programs that would make this new capability a cornerstone of our development process.
Capture Authentic Evidence
I contributed to the design of a state-of-the-art lab whose true power was its network capability. This allowed us to conduct remote testing with employees in their actual environments, branches and customer contact centers, capturing insights faster, more conveniently, and cheaper.
Make Research Frictionless
To drive adoption, we had to make getting user feedback easy. From the physical setup to the scheduling system, I helped engineer a seamless experience for product teams, ensuring the labs would become an indispensable and heavily-used tool for making smarter, more empathetic decisions
The Brutal Reality
The Political Fight for Funding
Prying a budget away from an established vendor relationship is one of the hardest political battles you can fight in a large company. We had to prove, not just promise, that our proposed in-house lab would deliver more value for less money than the marketing firms the bank already had on retainer.
The "Not Invented Here" Syndrome
We had to convince stakeholders that our small, internal team, armed with the right tools, could deliver faster, more relevant insights than the expensive external consultants they were used to hiring.
The Technical & Security Hurdles
Building a lab is one thing, building a networked lab that can securely tap into live branch and call center environments across the enterprise is another. We faced immense technical and security challenges to make remote, real-world testing a reality.
Overcoming "Internal Tool Neglect"
We had to fight the deep-seated cultural assumption that employee-facing software was a lower priority and didn't need to be as "good" as customer-facing products. We had to prove that this neglect was directly costing the bank money.
The Approach
My approach was to treat this initiative like an internal startup pitch. The pitch was simple, pragmatic, and powerful. Give us the money you're already spending on outside vendors, and we will build you a strategic asset that will pay for itself in the first year. We focused on demonstrating overwhelming value and de-risking the investment by showing we would be hands-on with every detail ourselves, from the physical blueprints to the operational training manuals. We made our proposal the only logical choice.
Facility Design & Vendor Management
We managed the entire process from blueprinting the physical space, complete with one-way mirrors and networked tech, to negotiating with vendors for all the necessary hardware and software.
ROI Modeling
We developed a clear financial model that forecasted the cost savings and risk reduction the labs would provide. We translated the "value of UX" into the language of the C-suite, dollars and cents.
Internal Roadshow & Evangelism
Once the labs were built, we launched an internal marketing campaign, running demos and workshops to showcase the facility and embed its use into the product development lifecycle.
A Foundational Capability for the Enterprise
This project was about more than just building rooms, it was about building a capability that didn't exist before. The usability lab we built became a cornerstone of the bank's growing UX practice.
From Stuck Costs into Strategic Assets
Our business case proved to be more than just a theory. The in-house labs delivered faster, more relevant insights than the external firms they replaced, all at a fraction of the long-term cost. We successfully converted a recurring operational expense into a permanent strategic asset that the bank now owns forever.
We Made the Invisible, Visible.
The remote testing capability was a game-changer. For the first time, senior leaders could no longer ignore the EX-to-CX connection. They saw undeniable video evidence of their own employees struggling with clunky software, which directly translated into longer customer wait times and frustrating service errors. Abstract problems became urgent, human realities.
We Built a Lasting Capability, Not Just a Project.
A lab is only as good as its process. The operational playbooks and training I helped create ensured the facility became a self-sustaining, heavily-used resource, not just our team's pet project. We permanently elevated the bank's design maturity and embedded a new, more empathetic way of working into their culture.
Related Work
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