By Aliza Pollack
With 20 years of strategic brand development and user experience research across varied brands and products, Aliza thrives on immersing herself into peoples’ worlds, and uncovering distinct client opportunities. Her goal, always, is to simplify and enable creativity. She’s worked across health brands on a variety of initiatives, particularly in the product innovation and program development space. Read More.
A financial institution came with a challenge around at-risk customers they couldn’t crack. Their outreach seemed on point: upbeat and direct communications across customer-preferred channels (text, email, in-app), well-timed alerts, bold lettering clarifying deadlines. And yet, response was anemic, customers were falling further behind, and debt was compounding.
And this team cared. They were thoughtful, well-intentioned people who genuinely wanted to help and believed in their customers’ ability to course-correct. They were trying to build a path to resolution but could not understand why few, if any, were opting in to connect with the company.
When Good Intentions Become The Blind Spot
Here’s what the team didn’t know, and could not have known from inside their own respective experiences: their customers were not willfully ignoring communications. The messages triggered them.
Many customers come from families where banks aren’t trusted, debt is a source of shame passed down through generations, and the language of APR, credit cycles, and minimum payments is rarely spoken — let alone explained. So, a bold-text email declaring “THIS IS WHAT YOU OWE. YOU HAVE 30 DAYS” delivers panic, not clarity. And people in panic mode do not read fine print. Instead, they tell themselves they’ll deal with it later, when they have more room to think and breathe — which, for those choosing between rent, car, and childcare payments — may never come.
The communications didn’t fail because of a design or content flaw. They were built for a customer who did not exist — a financially literate person with the emotional and practical bandwidth to process the urgency. Their actual customer lives paycheck to paycheck, carrying humiliation like an appendage, stuck in a vortex of need-to-pay but how-to-pay, and through it all, blaming themselves. So, how to address this misalignment?
First, We Designed An Engagement Process To Enable Listening
To give customers privacy, time, and the right conditions for honesty, we conducted IDIs. We also asked them to bring records of their experience: credit cards, past-due notices, bank statements, app access — to anchor the conversation in reality. When shame is involved, memory can be unreliable. Documents prioritize facts.
To our surprise, customers didn’t resist disclosure. Quite the contrary. For many, this was the first time speaking openly about their financial lives outside their immediate households. The interviews took on a therapeutic quality because we offered something rare: a structured, non-judgmental space to be heard without consequence.
And it became clear that customers were not indifferent or irresponsible, they were frightened, undertrained, and under-resourced — and the brand communications, however compassionate in intent, came across as alarmist. Every bold number, every deadline, every “ACT NOW” was one more punch representing that something terrible was happening and that they were both powerless to stop it and to blame for initiating it.
This empathy fueled our story. Our recommendations to the team were not tweaks to the existing template, but rather, an invitation to adopt a new strategy entirely: Be a coach, not a creditor. What this means for their customers:
- Start a relationship earlier — take on the role of educating from the beginning
- Find a more human voice for communications (even human form)
- Rethink timelines — people in crisis live paycheck to paycheck, not in 30-day increments
- Meet customers where they already go when they need help — YouTube, TikTok, peer-informed platforms where real people explain money in plain language
What This Means For You
If you are an internal insights leader, a strategist, or a client sitting with outreach that isn’t performing, consider these thoughts:
- Audit your assumptions before you audit your channels. It’s tempting to ask, “should this be an email or a text?” before asking, “do we actually understand who we’re talking to?” Channel is tactics. Understanding is strategy.
- Design for an emotional state, not a rational one. Every communication lands in a particular human moment — stressed, distracted, hopeful, afraid. Ask: When this arrives, what state is my customer likely in? Is my message built for that state, or for the version of them I wish existed? Most decision-making is emotional. Uncover those emotions.
- Treat empathy as a verb, not a judgment. Understanding your customer is not a one-time research event — it’s an ongoing practice. People’s circumstances change. Cultural context shifts. What was true two years ago may not hold today. Build in mechanisms to keep listening — pulse check-ins, community panels, repeat respondents, periodic IDIs or asynchronous boards, revisit old respondents, etc.
- Share the human, not the findings. The most under-used tool in any insights or marketing team’s kit is direct exposure. When a client team watches a real person experience their product, service, or communications in real time, it creates a reality that’s hard to shake. The more abstract your customer, the easier it is to keep designing for the imagined If you can’t bring stakeholders to every interview, build them a reel. A short compilation of unfiltered moments. A five-minute audio cut of real voices. Impress upon them the value (and depth) of hearing multiple voices and experiences.
If you enjoyed this blog, also check out:
Why Customer Understanding is the Real Competitive Advantage in Banking
More Data, Less Clarity: How Sidelining Qualitative Research Undermines Strategic Decision-Making