Acme

They were looking for confirmation, not a new problem

Acme claimed to know its customers well: databases of survey results, years of focus-group findings, detailed marketing personas, journey documentation, and an active customer-success team.

Its belief was straightforward: affordability was the problem. The next feature was all but set — extend financing from 12 months to 24 or 36 months and lower the monthly payment.

Our scope covered eight touchpoints and three card types across the journey. We mapped customer moments, pain points, and opportunities across the system, not one channel in isolation.

Before the customer interviews, we used two stakeholder workshops and interviews across the business to understand the existing experience, active initiatives, and where teams already saw friction. That gave us a system to test rather than treating the customer journey as a blank sheet.

But Acme was not really hunting for insight. It was looking for confirmation — a box to check before moving ahead. Data-rich did not automatically mean insight-rich: the existing research had not exposed where uncertainty entered the journey or why some customers stopped.

The problem happened before the price

We recruited 10 people through peers at Fjord and dscout. Participants needed to have had used Acme’s products. I conducted eight interviews over roughly two weeks and supported the other two through note-taking and research assistance.

One conversation made the problem especially clear. “Valerie” (not her real name) was sitting in her car waiting for a check-cashing store to open. She knew this kind of financing and had qualified before, but she was concerned with risk.

She needed her payment date to fall after her paycheck cleared. She was improving her credit and did not know whether applying would trigger a hard or soft pull. She also could not tell how long approval would take, what would happen next, or whether she would have to explain her financial situation in person.

Another seven of the 10 participants described variations of that uncertainty before a clear affordability decision.

Affordability mattered, but it was not always the first barrier.

Design around uncertainty, not just affordability

Valerie made the recommendations concrete: more due-date flexibility, clearer approval timing and next steps, and a more self-directed experience that reduced the need to explain a sensitive financial situation in person. Across the 10 conversations, those patterns also pointed toward a simpler application experience and clearer expectations throughout the process.

The interviews were one input into a larger service design effort. We combined what cardholders told us with stakeholder research and the existing journey, then used the service blueprint and CX Territories to connect customer moments, emotional states, pain points, and touchpoints across Engage, Apply, Use, and Service.

Co-creation was deliberate. In workshops, teams could validate, edit, or add customer moments and pain points before defining opportunities against what remained. The goal was to move from a collection of observations to a shared view of what should change.

From those opportunity areas, the team developed future-state concepts spanning digital and physical interactions and connected them to business cases and the three-year roadmap. The final materials also included a short film explaining the customer-centered approach, co-creation process, and future-state vision for internal audiences.