WhatsApp-Based Customer Support for Major LatAm Bank

Design for a culturally relevant customer support solution that reduced operational costs while improving customer satisfaction.

Designed an innovative WhatsApp banking solution that achieved high adoption rates while reducing expensive branch visits and improving NPS scores. The 16-week project successfully navigated complex cultural fraud concerns and regulatory requirements to deliver flexible, asynchronous customer support.

Role: Design Lead | Timeline: 16 weeks | Year: 2022-2023

Situation: A leading Argentinian bank forced customers through exhaustive processes across fragmented support channels, causing repeated information requests and inconsistent responses. Dissatisfied customers escalated to expensive branch visits, while the bank missed cross-sell opportunities and suffered poor NPS scores. Certain information was only available via specific channels, with no visibility into case status.

Task: Lead design of an innovative WhatsApp-based customer support solution leveraging the platform's high adoption in Argentina to create flexible, asynchronous support that reduces operational costs while improving customer satisfaction.

Action: I facilitated executive workshops identifying the core problem—customers contacted support across multiple channels because initial interactions didn't resolve issues. I guided a cross-functional research team through multi-phase validation with actual prototypes, discovering cultural concerns about WhatsApp security for financial information and fraud fears. I developed the solution vision and design principles for a conversational banking interface, creating smart authentication using low-sensitivity verification that maintained security while reducing friction. I designed pagination and filtering functionality for consuming dense transaction data in conversational format, prioritized use cases including transaction challenges and credit limit requests, and ensured integration with existing support systems to prevent further fragmentation.

Result: The WhatsApp channel achieved high adoption rates from the targeted underserved customer segments, validating the cultural and behavioral insights from research. Customer interactions generated valuable AI training data that enhanced machine learning models for future support improvements, creating a compounding benefit over time. The bank improved NPS scores through flexible, accessible support while significantly reducing expensive branch visits—customers could now resolve issues asynchronously on their schedule rather than taking time to visit physical locations. The successful navigation of complex cultural contexts (fraud concerns), regulatory requirements, and technical challenges (conversational UI for financial data) in Argentina demonstrated the power of deep user research in highly regulated international markets.