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Case Study

How One National Bank Reached 97% Log-In Success

How a national bank moved from knowing customers struggled to log in, to a measured, improving journey with eight coordinated fixes and a dashboard tracking 97% log-in success 



What Is Digital Journey Root Cause Analysis and Why Does It Matter?

Every failed digital interaction has the same exit: the phone. Log-in is the highest-volume moment in digital banking, the gate every customer passes through to do anything at all, and when it fails, that failure converts directly into contact center cost, abandoned tasks, and eroded trust. Yet log-in friction rarely gets treated as the operational problem it is. It gets logged as a UX complaint and queued behind feature work.

Digital journey root cause analysis solves the diagnosis problem by mapping the full journey, browse, register, log in, support, confirm, across every platform and device, and tracing failures back to where they actually start rather than where they're noticed. When that diagnosis is tied to the contact volume it generates, it stops being an annoyance and becomes a business case. When it's paired with recurring measurement, the fix becomes something leadership can watch improve.

Client Opportunity

A national bank ran two platforms for online banking and one for loans, and customers struggled across all three: trouble logging in, and a difficult experience even after success. Log-in issues alone drove 7% of customer engagement center volume, and new customers consistently reported challenges with the online platforms.

The bank had made real progress understanding root causes on its own. Andrew Reise was engaged to convert that understanding into coordinated action and to measure the journey well enough to prove the improvements and protect them.

The Challenge

Building a program that could fix log-in friction for good, rather than patching it once, required solving several distinct problems.

Log-in failures originated well before the log-in screen

Customers weren't just failing at the log-in box. Root causes traced back into registration, credential management, remedy paths, and agent practices, across desktop and mobile and across all three platforms. Treating log-in as a single screen, rather than the end of a longer customer journey, is why previous fixes hadn't stuck.

One business customer described continual login problems ever since changes to the business banking site, a reminder that fixes aimed at one platform can create friction on another if the journey isn't mapped end to end.

Attractive young woman working on a desktop computer smiling as she leans forwards reading text on the screen, view over the monitor

Point fixes don't survive uncoordinated rollout

Log-in friction is rarely one fix. Registration, single sign-on, self-serve unlock, and agent remedy practices each needed their own owner and their own workstream, and uncoordinated point solutions are typically why log-in friction survives previous attempts to solve it.

Measurement needed to be built in, not layered on after

Recurring measurement is what lets a team tell whether an incremental change actually helped or quietly made things worse. Without a dashboard tracking log-in success, registration success, task accomplishment, and satisfaction on an ongoing basis, every fix is a one-time guess rather than a tracked improvement.

Our Role

Andrew Reise was engaged to root-cause the log-in journey end to end, convert those findings into coordinated action, and build the measurement infrastructure to track and protect the improvements.

Digital Journey Root Cause Analysis

The team mapped the complete log-in journey, browse, register, log in, support, confirm, across desktop and mobile and across all three platforms, identifying where customers failed, why, and what they did next. This full-journey view is what surfaced that failures were originating in registration and remedy paths, not just at the log-in screen itself.

Coordinated Improvement Workstreams

Root-cause findings became eight defined workstreams, each with an owner: online banking registration on the bank's own site, registration optimization, single sign-on, an auto look-up function, agent and rep remedy practices including service hours, log-in content and customer remedy paths, customer self-serve unlock, and measurement itself as a dedicated workstream.

Journey-Aligned Measurement

Andrew Reise built a dashboard tracking what the journey actually needs to deliver: log-in success, registration success, task accomplishment after log-in, difficulty and ease, satisfaction, and advocacy, with self-service and assisted paths measured separately. Recurring measurement gave the team comparative data for every incremental change, so improvements compounded.

The same measurement discipline later extended into mapping the bank's full commercial and retail client journeys, making the log-in program the template for measuring experience bank-wide.

Industry
Financial Services

Case Study Attribute
Digital Experience, Digital Journey Root Cause Analysis, Contact Center Volume Reduction

Results

  • 97% log-in success
  • 94% registration success tracked on a live dashboard, alongside task accomplishment and experience metrics
  • Eight defined workstreams launched with named owners, converting root-cause findings into coordinated action
  • A recurring measurement model in place for ongoing insight, not a one-time set of findings
  • Enhanced customer care, improved retention, increased advocacy, and decreased service, retention, and turnover costs

Contact Us

Know Digital Friction Is Driving Calls, but Can't Prove How Much?

Most banks already sense that a failing digital journey is behind a slice of contact center volume. If that's where your team is stuck, let's talk. 

 

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Frequently Asked Questions

How much contact center volume does digital friction cause at a bank?

At this national bank, log-in issues alone drove 7% of customer engagement center volume, before counting other digital failure points. Contact volume is one of the most reliable diagnostics for digital experience problems, since a failed digital task almost always ends in a phone call. 

Why does log-in friction keep coming back even after banks try to fix it?

Because most fixes target the log-in screen itself, while the actual causes often sit upstream in registration, credential management, or agent remedy practices. In this engagement, root-cause mapping traced failures back across the full journey, browse, register, log in, support, confirm, which is why the fix held instead of resurfacing a few months later. 

What is digital journey root cause analysis?

A structured investigation of where and why customers fail across a digital journey, on each platform and device, using behavioral data, contact drivers, and customer feedback. The output is a causal map that lets fixes target sources of failure rather than symptoms, which is what turned this engagement's findings into eight owned workstreams instead of one patch. 

What metrics should a bank use to measure its log-in experience?

Journey-aligned metrics on a recurring dashboard: log-in success rate, registration success rate, task accomplishment after log-in, difficulty and ease, and downstream measures like satisfaction and advocacy, with self-service and assisted paths tracked separately. This engagement measured log-in success at 97% and registration success at 94% once the workstreams were underway. 

How do you know if a digital fix is actually working after launch?

Only if measurement is built in from the start, with a baseline and a recurring dashboard rather than a one-time before-and-after comparison. Here, measurement was treated as its own workstream, giving the team comparative data for every incremental change so improvements compounded instead of quietly regressing. 

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