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FNBO + Fuel Cycle

Finding the ‘So What?’ Behind Your Research

FNBO, a financial institution that provides a range of banking and financial services to its customers, partnered with Fuel Cycle to strengthen its methods of receiving customer insights and putting them to use.
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Overview

First National Bank of Omaha (FNBO) is a financial institution that provides a range of banking and financial services to its customers. As with any business, understanding its customers’ needs and preferences is essential to FNBO’s success. Customer insights help FNBO to identify customer pain points and address them, to design products and services that meet their customers’ needs, and to provide better customer service. Moreover, customer insights help FNBO to anticipate changes in customer behavior and market trends, which can inform the development of new products and services to meet evolving customer needs. Ultimately, FNBO’s success is largely dependent on its ability to understand and meet its customers’ expectations, and customer insights are crucial in achieving this goal. FNBO partnered with Fuel Cycle to strengthen its methods of receiving customer insights and putting them to use.

The Problem

The FNBO Insights team aimed to leverage a more efficient and innovative approach to engage a broader audience and amplify their department’s productivity.

FNBO’s Insights Team conducts continuous research efforts to monitor customers satisfaction with the bank’s core products and services, as well as to gather ideas for improving the overall customer experience.  This type of research offered guidance for ideation and strategy for the overall products and services being offered, but it was time consuming and difficult to test smaller, more frequent, iterations.  Using their current set of tools required a lengthy set-up time and the team strived for a more efficient way to gather, interpret, and apply the intelligence gathered from the survey results to drive actionable next steps.

While the FNBO Insights Team was already delivering analysis to teams within the company, they wanted to maximize its value by using a more efficient process to get in touch with a diverse audience. They knew they needed a more advanced and innovative process to increase the scale of what their department produced.  

jeff dahms

Jeff Dahms

Director of Customer Experience

FNBO

“It would take us about four-to-eight weeks to design, launch, and analyze research. It didn’t really allow us to achieve the speed of innovation that we really wanted. We knew we needed our own customer research panel complete with access to advanced research functionality to help the organization reach its goal of being customer-led. Now, we typically get 90% of the responses from a project within the first 24-36 hours, which allows us to give our project teams insights they can take action on immediately.”

The Solution

The FNBO Insights team collaborated with Fuel Cycle to enhance their customer feedback collection and analysis through customer-led, continuous, and efficient methods.

The FNBO Insights Team partnered with Fuel Cycle to provide tools that would further improve the team’s ability to collect and analyze customer feedback in a way that was customer-led, continuous, and efficient. Fuel Cycle provided a range of tools and services to help meet their research needs.

Through its partnership with Fuel Cycle, FNBO was able to ask customers opinions in the form that worked best for the customer and at the speed that was right for the organization.  They were able to take full advantage of their customers willingness to give feedback by making it more convenient, on their timeline, and based on the subjects they wanted to talk about. Fuel Cycle provided a wide range of research tools from which to gather insights, such as discussion boards, heat maps, and virtual IDIs. This allowed for flexibility in research methods which benefitted FNBO’s overall customer-led approach, the Insights Team, and customers by providing more comprehensive insights from a wider range of customers. 

The Results

By adopting Fuel Cycle’s versatile research tools and embracing a customer-centric approach, FNBO elevated its customer insights strategy.

By leveraging Fuel Cycle’s tools and embracing a more comprehensive and customer-centric approach to research, FNBO was able to take its customer insights strategy to the next level. With the customizable research process offered by Fuel Cycle, FNBO was able to expand beyond surveys and incorporate a range of tools such as discussion boards, heat maps, and live virtual IDIs. This helped FNBO to better understand its customers’ needs at the speed of innovation, and ultimately drive better business decisions.

One major benefit of working with Fuel Cycle was the expanded pool of customers that FNBO could access through the platform. This was particularly valuable as it allowed FNBO to gather insights from a more diverse group of customers.

Another significant advantage was the ability for FNBO’s Insights Team to iterate on their own research process. Fuel Cycle’s platform provided the team with the flexibility to try new approaches and methods, leading to a more effective research process overall.

Perhaps most importantly, the speed of insights improved. What used to take 4-6 weeks, now only took 24-48 hours. This allowed FNBO to be more agile and responsive, particularly in situations where timely insights were crucial. FNBO could now take a survey request from another department, provide recommendations, and manipulate the available tools to get the answers they needed, all within a few days. This shortened time-to-insights also helped the Insights Team stay ahead of their stakeholders’ needs and be proactive in delivering insights – even conducting research on how to address certain issues before being asked. This proactive approach helped the FNBO Insights Team demonstrate their value and expertise to leadership and stakeholders, which helped build crucial trust between them. 

Overall, partnering with Fuel Cycle enabled FNBO to evolve their research process, gather more comprehensive insights, and do so in a more agile and efficient way.

Lessons Learned

It’s important to prepare for new methods, tools, and outcomes, researching and adapting as necessary to meet stakeholder needs and ultimately driving improved business decisions.

Recognizing when you’re ready for change is an essential step towards improving your research processes. Whether this recognition stems from feedback from customers or stakeholders, you’ll know when it’s time to try something different.

Once you’ve identified the need for change, it’s important to set the stage for new processes, tools, use cases, and findings. Take the time to research what needs to be changed, how it will be done, and how to synthesize the results to meet stakeholders’ needs.

Going forward with changes, it’s crucial to remember that you’re free to adjust as needed. Even if you’ve executed certain changes, you can always adapt and make modifications later. By embracing a flexible approach to change, you’ll be better equipped to respond to feedback, improve your processes, and drive better business decisions.

The Fuel Cycle Difference

Fuel Cycle’s award-winning Research Engine is the most comprehensive intelligence-gathering ecosystem that exists today. Our platform enables decision-makers to maintain constant connections with their customers, prospects, and users to uncover real-world actionable intelligence. By integrating human insight with critical business data, and through automated quantitative and qualitative research solutions, Fuel Cycle’s Research Engine powers product innovation, brand intelligence, and enhanced user experience.

Breakthroughs require action. We built Fuel Cycle to ignite it.

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