Background

Prompted by customer frustration (according to Capital One call center data) with manually entering Zelle recipient contact information (email or mobile number) each time s/he wants to send or request money with Zelle, we needed to allow customers to see recent recipients.

Problem Statement

As a Zelle user, I want to be able to see recent recipients to make it easier to send them money again.

Understanding User (Empathize & Design)

Re-entering data needlessly is a customer frustration. Through internal informal research and review of external user feedback channels, we were able to verify this was a problem for our customers.

Low Fidelity

Because native Address Book functionality was leveraged, we were able to move directly to mid-fidelity concepts in Sketch. And the product team was confident in the solution; no testing was done prior to the new feature going into production.

The solution was to leverage native address book functionality (iOS and Android) to display the five most recent Zelle recipients when the customer selects either Send Money or Request Money from their account landing screen in the Capital One app.

In service of transparency, the Zelle-registered name of the recipient is displayed with the recipient’s registered email address or mobile number (in Zelle parlance, this is a ‘token’).

Pre-registered recipients display the email address or mobile number only as they are unknown recipients in the Zelle network and therefore do not have a token owner displayed. The ‘ownerless’ token display implies that the transaction is currently incomplete; money has been sent (or requested) but the pre-registered recipient has not yet taken action to receive or respond.

Final Result

Putting Recent Zelle Contacts into production has resulted in a decrease in user errors by 2000 monthly and a marked increase in customer satisfaction with Send/Request flows.

Learnings

The feature has real benefit for Capital One in the significant reduction in calls and substantial cost savings (as their US-based call centers are high-cost), future iterations can have even greater transparency so the customer can make better-informed decisions around sending money with Zelle.