Customers and employees want to feel comfortable and have their needs met simply and without complications. Here are a few examples of what we are doing at U.S. Bank to listen to feedback from our customers and employees, aiming to have our technology help them feel more comfortable.

We are building a new interface for our tellers to use when engaging with our customers. We solicited feedback from more than 500 tellers and bankers during the design of the project, and we learned what we thought would be very helpful to them was not. Their feedback helped us realize a key feature we overlooked that ended up being essential to the interface functionality. The additional software development we added to the project to build the key feature is well worth the additional time and investment because we know we are building the right solution that will enable them to do their jobs more efficiently.

Another example comes from our annual employee engagement survey that helps us understand what we’re doing well and what we can do better. The improvements we make are directly based on employee feedback and help us grow as a company. Through this survey, we heard repeatedly from employees that the current e-mail and calendar solution was not the best tool for them to work most collaboratively and efficiently. Based on that, we invested in delivering the web-based tool for e-mail and calendar to all employees. In January of this year, we started migrating select employees to web app, sought feedback on their user experience, and heard from employees who heavily depend on e-mail and calendar that they needed more functionality. As a result of that feedback, we made the decision to include the more robust desktop client in our implementation to ensure employees had the right e-mail and calendar functionality for their jobs.

We are also learning how to make the workspaces for our employees more comfortable and collaborative for the type of work they do, and actively applying what we have learned to some of our real estate projects. In San Francisco, we have a new collaborative workspace that reflects our core values and reinforces our key theme of one U.S. Bank. The workspace includes huddle rooms for employees to discuss, engage and work collaboratively across teams and toward a common objective. As part of this collaborative workspace, our customer experience lab provides space to bring in customers to observe how they use our digital capabilities and have them give immediate, direct feedback.

Whether responding to employee feedback to deliver the best technology tools or listening to customers to understanding their unique needs, customer centric engineering is critical to the success of our organization.