Customer Journey
Redesign — Zenith Bank

Overview

At Zenith Bank, I was part of the team responsible for gathering requirements and producing documentation for digital banking service improvements. This was early in my career — before I had the title of designer — but the work was fundamentally design: understanding how customers experienced the bank's services and identifying where the experience broke down.

The journey mapping work I did here became the foundation for everything I've built since.

Problem

Zenith Bank was expanding its digital services, but customer feedback indicated friction at multiple points in key journeys — account opening, fund transfers, dispute resolution. The business needed to understand where these friction points were and in what priority order to address them.

Process

• Facilitated requirements gathering sessions with business stakeholders
• Conducted structured observation at branch and call centre touchpoints
• Mapped 5-phase customer journeys for 3 core service areas
• Documented internal processes alongside customer journeys to identify where customer-visible friction originated
• Produced prioritised recommendations with estimated business impact
• Presented findings to senior management for investment decisions

Design Decisions

The most important decision was to conduct observation, not just interviews. Customers described their experience differently from how they actually behaved — the gaps between those two were where the most valuable insights lived.

Mapping customer and internal journeys in parallel made the root causes visible: most customer friction wasn't caused by the digital interface, but by internal handoff failures that manifested as delays or incorrect information at customer touchpoints.