While I was on the Capital One Home Loans team as a UI / UX designer, customer complaints brought attention to a particular piece of mail correspondence: The Annual Escrow Analysis. For the next few months, I dropped my usual focus on digital experiences and became the sole designer recreating this confusing home loan legal document.
I challenged my product and tech partners to approach this problem with a seemingly simple idea, to hide and show content on the statement so that the customers only saw disclaimers relevant to them.
In the quarter following release, redesigned escrow analysis statements led to a 50% decrease in Tier 2 complaints into the call center and no escalated Tier 3 complaints related to statements. General escrow accounting calls were also significantly impacted, dropping by 24%.
Since designs were built with scale in mind, I was able to replicate the success of this report in other correspondence. This consistency sped up letter production and reduced cost by reducing the number of different envelopes used.
The same version of this statement was sent to everyone, so disclaimers littered the page and forced customers to search for the instructions relevant to their particular situation.
"If you're bankrupt..."
"If you have a shortage..."
"If you're surplus is more than $50..."
"Your escrow account may contain a cushion..."
These disclosures are giving instructions for situations we knew the customer wasn't in.
For each version of the statement, we wanted to understand if participants...
"It makes it really clear as to what my 3 choices are without having to read over everything to get an understanding of that."
- Participant referencing the legal size version
"Where do I look to find the payment? ...to understand it?"
- Participant referencing the control
"I’m still not quite convinced of what the next steps would be. I would definitely need help in reading this further.”
- Participant referencing the control
Below is the result from this research, a long collaboration with the legal team, and discussions with agents and developers. Each customer received one of 15+ versions of this statement, customized to their situation.
In the quarter following release, redesigned escrow analysis statements led to a 50% decrease in Tier 2 complaints into the call center and no escalated Tier 3 complaints related to statements. General escrow accounting calls were also significantly impacted, dropping by 24%.
