Building Empathy and Strategy for Small Business Plans Customers

Capital Group, a global investment firm with over $2.5 trillion in assets, serves millions of investors worldwide. Within the Small Business Plans division, multiple teams were working to improve the customer experience. This project aimed to align cross-functional teams by defining key customer segments, mapping the customer journey, and identifying opportunities to improve and streamline the experience.

Role
Senior UX Design

Timeframe
2016, 8 months

Outcomes

Tasks
UX design and research

Industry
FinTech

Product Category
Enterprise Tool

Challenge

The Small Business Plans team was struggling with misalignment on both the definition of their target customer and their end-to-end experience. Internal departments—marketing, sales, product, and service—each had a different understanding of who the customer was, what their needs were, and how they interacted with the product. This lack of shared perspective led to siloed efforts, duplicated work, inconsistent messaging, and missed opportunities to solve real customer pain points.

Without a unified customer journey or clear segmentation, teams lacked the insight to prioritize initiatives, spot experience gaps, or measure meaningful impact.

Objectives

Customer Journey

  • Create a unified view of the Simple IRA customer journey across touch points, products and departments

  • Identify key pain points and moments of opportunity along the journey

  • Foster cross-functional alignment to support more cohesive and customer-centered product decisions

Persona

  • Develop accurate, research-backed personas based on interviews with real small business owners

  • Uncover user motivations, challenges, and decision-making behaviors related to retirement plan adoption

  • Use personas as ongoing tools to inform prioritization, communication, and design decisions

Customer Journey

A Customer Journey is a visual and strategic tool that maps out the end-to-end experience a customer has with a product or service. It highlights key touchpoints, emotions, pain points, and opportunities across the full lifecycle—from awareness to engagement, support, and retention.

At Capital Group, I led the creation of a comprehensive Customer Journey that reflected the perspectives of both individual investors and internal stakeholders. To do this, I conducted stakeholders and customer interviews, facilitated cross-functional workshops, and synthesized findings into a shared visual framework. This journey map became a key alignment tool, used to identify experience gaps, prioritize improvements, and guide roadmap planning across departments.

Personas

To guide customer-centered decisions, we created four personas based on interviews with real small business plan users. These personas helped align teams across Capital Group by surfacing shared goals, behaviors, and pain points among key customer types.

What Are Personas?

Personas are research-based profiles that represent different customer types. They reflect key patterns in motivation, behavior, and challenges—supporting design, product, and messaging decisions.

Process Summary

1. Grouped Interviews by Role

We first grouped participants by function (e.g., business owners, administrators, advisors) to simplify pattern recognition.

2. Identified Key Variables

We looked for differences in behavior and mindset—such as plan literacy, advisor reliance, tech comfort, company size, and plan goals.

3. Mapped Patterns

We identified clusters based on decision-making, support needs, and attitudes toward compliance vs. employee engagement.

4. Defined Persona Goals

We captured top goals like contributing quickly, reducing admin time, and promoting retirement education.

  • Developed four key personas that captured the goals, behaviors, and pain points of distinct customer types across Small Business Plans. These personas brought clarity and empathy to internal teams and served as a foundation for the customer journey mapping effort.

  • Mapped the full customer journey using persona insights to highlight critical gaps, pain points, and moments of opportunity specific to each customer type.

  • Improved cross-functional alignment across product, marketing, customer service, and business development by grounding discussions in shared customer understanding.

  • Enabled more strategic roadmap prioritization by connecting initiatives directly to the unique needs and challenges of the personas.