Abstract
Bank clients’ expectations for enhanced service experiences have increased with the digitalization of banking services and the rise of FinTech. However, despite the availability of online banking services, many clients still prefer personal financial advice due to the personal interaction involved. There has been a growing interest in IT-supported advisory services to meet this demand, aiming to improve customer experience and reduce the cognitive burden on advisors. While previous studies have shown the positive effects of advisory-support systems, they also highlighted downsides such as unnatural interactions, technology’s domination of the interaction space, and impaired impression management. This paper investigates the potential of pen-and-paper user interfaces to resolve the relationship/decision-making tension in advisory services. It evaluates the design of an artifact called bankNotes with eight bank advisors and 24 clients in a within-subject study by drawing on a rich data set consisting of interviews, surveys, and video analysis of the encounters. The results indicate that bankNotes was well-received by advisors, who embraced both existing pen-and-paper practices and new practices facilitated by the system. The clients also benefitted from the system: using bankNotes improved customer orientation, shared understanding, and overall service quality. This research provides valuable insights into the design of advisory support systems that prioritize customer satisfaction and support the needs of both advisors and clients in the banking sector.
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1 Introduction
Bank clients expect an improved service experience with the progression of digitalization, especially since the emergence of FinTech (Zavolokina et al. 2016). Despite the increasing offers of online banking services and robo-advice (Jung et al. 2018; D’Acunto et al. 2019), clients still often prefer personal financial advice. They trust the interpersonal exchange in the encounter and lack financial literacy in complex financial topics (e.g., to find an ideal mortgage mix for their future home) (Dolata and Schwabe 2017). While regulatory pressure and technological progress push IT-supported personal financial advice to the banks’ offices, it remains an under-researched area.
The existing body of literature studies the potential of IT-supported advisory services (Heyman and Artman 2015; Schmid et al. 2022). Such digital tools are designed to improve the customer experience and satisfaction and simultaneously reduce the cognitive burden on the advisors (e.g., by automatically creating regulatory-required documentation). Previous studies have demonstrated the positive effects of advisory-support systems (Nussbaumer et al. 2012; Heinrich et al. 2014a; Giesbrecht et al. 2017). However, these systems also often come with significant downsides, such as enforced, unnatural interactions (Kilic et al. 2015), domination of the interaction space (Heinrich et al. 2014a), and partially impaired impression management (Dolata et al. 2021). In an attempt to support both advisor and advisee, the systems uncover a pre-existing tension between the two main modes of financial advice: relationship-building and decision-making. Traditionally, advisors use pen and paper as the main tools in financial advice as they do not disturb building a connection with the client (Kilic et al. 2016; Dolata and Schwabe 2017). Most advisory-support systems do not consider advisors’ preferences for pen and paper and rather focus on the decision-making mode (Nussbaumer et al. 2012; Giesbrecht et al. 2017; Heinrich and Schwabe 2018). As a result, the designs of advisory-support systems demonstrate the inherent relationship/decision-making tension in financial service encounters. Research could not yet offer a conclusive answer on how to blend the seemingly opposing requirements of the two modes in one system. Thus, conventional pen-and-paper settings often remain the gold standard for advisory services (Dolata and Schwabe 2017).
“Calm technology” has the potential to overcome this tension as it has been well received in service encounters in previous research (Stankov and Filimonau 2019; Dolata et al. 2020). Calm technology aims to achieve a user’s state of being “free from agitation, excitement, and disturbance” while interacting with the technology (Riekki et al. 2004). Calm technology, seen as the technology and its physical surroundings, is carefully designed not to disturb the user’s focus while being ubiquitous in the user’s periphery (Brown et al. 2017). Recent studies explore the potential of calm technology for service encounters in banking (Dolata et al. 2020) and tourism (Stankov and Filimonau 2019). Dolata et al. (2020) demonstrate the positive effects of augmented reality (AR) on the client’s perception of financial service encounters by augmenting physical paper with projected visualizations. However, such AR systems are often expensive and not mobile, limiting their application area. Also, through their uncommon character and technical instability (e.g., dependence on light conditions), such uncalm systems might distract the participants, hampering relationship-building and interaction with the advisor. Overall, AR systems necessary to implement calm technology could induce too much excitement into the encounter (Riekki et al. 2004). This “uncalmness” could distract from the interactions between clients and advisors even more than well-adopted technologies (Kilic et al. 2016; Misra et al. 2016). While solutions developed along the lines of calm technology provided valuable insights into the value of “digital” paper, AR can pose significant challenges to achieving true calmness. Consequently, designers and researchers of advisory-support systems are still searching for an appropriate solution to the relationship/decision-making tension.
Surprisingly, pen-and-paper user interfaces (PPUIs) have not yet been studied as calm technology for advice-giving despite the indicated value of “digital” paper. PPUIs combine the physical and digital worlds to maintain social interactions and material practices (König et al. 2009; Blake 2012). While not explicated, this approach was followed in the AR system proposed by Dolata et al. (2020) as it augments physical paper with projections. Due to the persistence of pen-and-paper practices in advisory services, PPUIs appear promising for such encounters (Steimle 2012). Digitized paper could offer the same versatility and calmness as its physical counterpart, allowing advisors and clients to engage in meaningful conversations. Consequently, PPUIs, as a potential form of calm technology, could be the key to resolving the tension between relationship-building and decision-making (i.e., improving both). However, the literature does not provide a conclusive answer to this idea. Therefore, we ask the following research question:
How can digitizing pen-and-paper practices improve decision-making and relationship-building in advisory services compared with the conventional pen-and-paper setting?
To address this research question, we designed bankNotes in a design science research project (Hevner et al. 2004). bankNotes is an advisory-support system that combines insights from paper practices and calm technology. It goes beyond existing efforts to digitize paper practices in AR (Dolata et al. 2020) by digitizing the pen-and-paper setup in a PPUI. We compare bankNotes with conventional pen-and-paper settings because they are still the gold standard. This study focuses on the final evaluation of bankNotes following the framework for evaluation in design science research (FEDS) proposed by Venable et al. (2016). bankNotes was evaluated with eight bank advisors and 24 clients in a within-subject design experiment (Mettler et al. 2014). Our results show little friction in adopting bankNotes as the advisors engage in their existing pen-and-paper practices and embrace new practices facilitated by bankNotes, such as exploring hypothetical scenarios to elicit their clients’ implicit needs. bankNotes increases customer orientation, improves shared understanding, and improves service quality. Based on our insights, we make a two-fold contribution to research on advisory-support systems. First, we propose calm advice as a new paradigm for designing advisory-support systems. Second, our study offers design knowledge for advisory-support systems implementing calm advice to address the persisting relationship/decision-making tension. Thereby, we position PPUIs as a particularly suitable calm technology for financial advice to resolve the relationship/decision-making tension.
2 Related Work
Advisory services are encounters in which experts and laypeople exchange information and collaboratively solve a complex problem to derive an optimal financial solution (Jungermann 1999). They usually consist of two main modes: relationship-building and decision-making (Kilic et al. 2016). It has been shown how financial advisors can build strong relationships with clients that allow them to make better financial decisions and increase the clients’ financial literacy (Collins 2012).
However, tension arises between the two modes when technology is introduced into the encounter. Past research has uncovered challenges in harmonizing IT-supported relationship-building and decision-making. These two modes shape the interaction between the client and the advisor. On the one hand, financial advisory services involve factual decisions with significant and lasting implications for the client and the bank. Honoring the implications requires transparency (Nussbaumer et al. 2012), explicit communication (Dolata and Schwabe 2017), and effective information transfer (i.e., aspects used to describe a high-quality service) (Dolata et al. 2019a). On the other hand, clients and advisors value seamless and pleasant interaction that aligns with social norms, supports good command between the two, and allows for adequate impression management (Heinrich et al. 2014a; Dolata and Schwabe 2017). These differences point toward tension between the provision of hard facts necessary for decision-making and socially pleasant conduct necessary for relationship building (Kilic et al. 2016). We call this the relationship/decision-making tension.
In the following, we introduce practice theory as our kernel theory to understand the problem space in Sect. 2.1. This foundation allows us to study the three design waves of advisory-support systems (i.e., problem space, see Sect. 2.2). We then introduce pen-and-paper user interfaces (PPUIs) as a form of calm technology and our kernel theory for the solution space (see Sect. 2.3).
2.1 The Role of Paper Practices in Advisory Service Encounters
Practices are action types in which humans repeatedly and directly engage but usually do not consciously analyze (Scollon 2002; Nicolini 2012). For example, practice theory studies how medical professionals use paper to document a patient’s medical history (Jones 2009). These actions are situated in an (institutional) context, such as an advisory encounter that predetermines the boundaries of acceptable actions (Hazel and Mortensen 2014). They are performed by people using objects in space and time and are usually irreversible (Scollon 2002). Practices emerge within broader organizational and technical structures (Orlikowski 2008). Also, individual goals impact the existence and form of practice. We understand rationales as an individual’s implicit targets, desires, and wishes that shape practice. Such rationales might emerge as a response to more general societal inputs, e.g., public discourse about advisors’ unethical behavior (Scollon 2002).
The scientific discourse of practices spans multiple accounts that complement each other and stress different aspects of human action (Nicolini 2012). In this manuscript, we employ the notion put forward by Scollon (2002). Scollon posits that individuals function at the confluence of various discourses, societal identities, and objectives. Humans act as the intersection of various discourses introduced through speech, texts, tools, material, or spatial configurations (Scollon 2002; Nicolini 2012). Accordingly, actions engage directly or indirectly with prevailing social discourses – actions can problematize, reproduce, or derail discourses present in society. Advisory services interact with a variety of prominent discourses and identities: the discourse of financial advisors as self-serving salespersons that emerged after the financial crisis of 2008, the discourse of banks as rich and covetous institutions, and the identities of clients and providers. It was shown that those aspects are reflected in the material and conversational performances of the advisors and advisees (Kilic et al. 2017; Dolata and Schwabe 2017). Practice theory sharpens the researcher’s observations of practices, such as creating artifacts, moving the interaction from one topic to another, guiding the clients’ attention, and thus managing their impression (Dolata and Schwabe 2017). For example, a financial advisor withdrawing a printout with property information from the interaction space in the middle of a table signals the end of the exchange and opens room for the next phase. Accordingly, practice theory is an excellent kernel theory in the problem space of this study. It affords studying the inner workings of advisory services.
2.2 Advisory-Support Systems in Financial Counselling
The 2008 financial crisis was a breaking point for financial advisory services, associated with bank advisors’ inappropriate and even purposefully misleading advice to their clients. One of the core problems was the information transparency between the advisor and the client, putting the advisor in an advantageous position (Nussbaumer et al. 2009). Combined with insufficient customer orientation (i.e., ineffective collection and consideration of client needs and wishes), advisory services got out of balance. In the literature, we observe three design waves of advisory-support systems to restore trust in financial advice.
The first wave of development was focused on standardizing advisory service practices through IT. Before the 2008 crisis, advisors consistently refused such standardization as they saw their personalities and individual relationships with clients at risk (Schwabe and Nussbaumer 2009). Nevertheless, the crisis fueled interest in systems that enforced or suggested advisory processes, offered new visualizations, and introduced new activities in the advisory services (Nussbaumer 2012; Nussbaumer et al. 2012). The proposed solutions achieved the desired effect. They enhanced process and information transparency, guaranteed that more information about the client was collected during the advisory service and that clients were better informed about their investments (Nussbaumer et al. 2012; Heinrich et al. 2014b; Kilic et al. 2015). However, the IT-supported behaviors were detached from the practices of many advisors. As a result, the detachment made the system look out of place, and none of the proposed solutions reached a productive state. Figure 1 (left) depicts this situation, indicating that designs oriented entirely at intended practices might be removed from the practice altogether.
Designing for intended behavior (left) and designing for current practices (right)
As a reaction to this refusal, research turned to the advisors’ existing practices in the second design wave. The assumption was that systems that effectively support and integrate current practices into the process would be more accessible to the stakeholders. Accordingly, many of the explicit structures and improvements of the previous generation of systems were loosened. For instance, rigid structures for collecting client needs were replaced with organic designs, subject to the advisors’ control (Kilic et al. 2017). New designs replicated the idea of a toolbox rather than a process, allowing the advisors to choose when and if they use some tools at all (Kilic et al. 2016).
However, the evaluations showed that the systems were considered a disturbance that did not provide any added value (Kilic et al. 2016) or created confusion on the client side (Kilic et al. 2017). Despite the uptake of systems like those in the field (Nueesch et al. 2016), there is a lack of evidence that they were improving the quality of the advisory service for the client or the advisor (Heyman and Artman 2015). Even though some systems were commercialized because they could create efficiency gains upon intense training, they barely introduced new behaviors, as indicated in Fig. 1 (right). The evidence collected in this wave of research suggested that simply supporting the existing practices is insufficient. The advisors reverted willingly to their conventional practice even though it might have implied additional work, such as transferring paper notes to customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
A study investigating the reasons for the persistence of such conventional practices showed that advisors use paper and engage in paper-oriented practice to make the right impression on the client. Pen and paper are among the most popular tools for collaboration. Multiple studies identified paper as the primary tool in workplaces across different settings and industries (Luff et al. 2010; Svinhufvud and Vehviläinen 2013; Dolata and Schwabe 2017; Akhu-Zaheya et al. 2018). The dominance and persistence of paper, despite the advancing digitalization, are rooted in the specific properties of paper. Paper has a unique set of visual, mechanical, and technical properties favored over technology in work environments (Gaver 1996; Sellen and Harper 2003). For example, paper is simple to navigate and parallelize. It allows people to create ad hoc structures such as sketches and mark-up documents (Sellen and Harper 2003). Further, paper has no agency and does not introduce a third party (e.g., the bank) to the encounter. In their study on paper practices in financial advisory, Dolata and Schwabe (2017) uncover the significance of pen and paper for the ‘impression management’ of advisors. Those practices signalize their institutional role and express their personality.
These insights launched a third design wave integrating pen and paper with more appealing visualization and process support. The third wave produced an augmented-reality-based system concerned with the rationales to integrate them with new means for improving the quality of the advice. The AR system was shown to improve advisory service quality, satisfaction, transparency, and interaction between the advisor and the client (Dolata et al. 2020). At the same time, the system afforded existing and new practices to support impression management and structuring the interaction according to institutional roles according to advisors’ rationales (Dolata et al. 2019a, 2019b). Consequently, the designed artifact integrated well into advisory services while introducing new practices, which enhanced the service experience. As depicted in Fig. 2, the new intended practices merged with the existing ones, creating a new advisory service experience for the clients and helping the advisor realize their implicit goals. The system attracted interest from practice and is now commercialized.Footnote 1
Designing IT for practices and their rationales
The mentioned system shows promising results in integrating with existing advisory practices and fostering new behaviors. However, how such designs could resolve the relationship/decision-making tension is still unclear. The complex hardware and software can potentially distract from the collaboration between advisors and clients. Considering the importance of pen and paper for financial advisory, we wonder if similar effects can be achieved with a more lightweight and non-obstructive technical configuration using off-the-shelf technologies and conventional architecture.
2.3 Pen-and-Paper Interfaces as Calm Technology
The success of the third wave can be associated with the design of a PPUI. PPUIs are a promising approach to combining relationship-building and decision-making in advisory-support services. PPUIs acknowledge that traditional technology, such as desktop computers, limits social interactions and material practices by combining the physical and digital worlds (Dolata et al. 2020). PPUIs are a form of natural user interface that imitates and augments the most traditional pair of technology in advisory services: pen and paper (Steimle 2009, 2012). They reflect the characteristics of physical paper that create a non-intrusive drawing or writing experience that allows advisors to keep a conversation running and take notes.
Further, PPUIs aim to combine the advantages of physical paper and technological capabilities. On the one hand, paper is versatile and allows for the ad-hoc creation of structures (Dolata and Schwabe 2017). For example, an advisor can calculate a mortgage option on a piece of paper, illustrating the way of calculation. Once finished, they can share their calculation by placing the paper in the middle of the table. If the client requests a second option, the advisor can either place a second paper next to the first or separate the two options on one paper by drawing a line between the options. On the other side, manually calculating mortgage options is time-consuming. Digital technology affords faster calculation due to its processing speed, allowing the interlocutors to explore more options in a shorter time. In the context of advisory services, PPUI can resemble paper affordances such as ad hoc content creation, content navigation, and document annotation.
Despite the potential suitability, PPUIs have not yet been studied as calm technology. In his seminal work “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Mark Weiser Field (1999) wrote, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear”. Calm technology offers the user a seamless and unobtrusive experience with minimal disruptions. The core principle behind calm technology is to design systems that empower users without demanding excessive attention (Weiser and Brown 1996). In her work on calm technology, Amber Case (2015) proposes eight principles for designing calm technology that allows users to achieve their goals with the lowest mental costs. Accordingly, calm technology aims to reduce the user’s cognitive load as it is “free from agitation, excitement, and disturbance” (Riekki et al. 2004). This state is achieved through carefully designing the technology and its surroundings (Case 2015). Calm technology should strive to become a natural extension of its environment. The technology is readily available to the user without disturbing their focus. For instance, new information can be displayed in the user’s periphery until they decide to move it to the center of their attention (Brown et al. 2017).
Unsurprisingly, calm technology has been adopted for service encounters in banking (Dolata et al. 2020) and tourism (Stankov and Filimonau 2019). Dolata et al. (2019a; 2020) demonstrate how AR combines sensitive social interaction with cutting-edge technology to improve customer satisfaction. This research provides valuable insights into how PPUIs could facilitate natural interactions while tapping into the advantages of digital technologies. However, considering the delicate social interaction in financial services, AR might induce too much excitement in the encounter. This excitement positively influences the client’s perception but could hamper the advisors’ relationship-building (Dolata et al. 2019a). In a recent study, advisors report fear of competing for the client’s attention and losing freedom in organizing the encounter (Dolata et al. 2020). AR systems show promising results in remedying some of the persisting problems. However, the technology itself and its surroundings (i.e., dim lighting needed for projections) still introduce disturbance to the encounter, hindering relationship building between advisor and advisee.
Accordingly, financial service encounters require a combination of the physical and digital worlds that create a calm environment. In this study, we explore calm advice as a combination of calm profiling and calm decision-making. As argued above, calm technology as a kernel theory offers valuable insights for the solution space when designing bankNotes. Leveraging PPUIs as calm technology could mitigate technology’s adverse effects on advisory services. It might thereby resolve the relationship/decision-making tension (Kilic et al. 2016). A more paper-like system could mimic paper affordances such as natural interactions and minimal inherent agency. Since PPUIs intend to resemble conventional pen-and-paper settings, we wonder how digitizing pen-and-paper practices can improve decision-making and relationship-building in advisory services.
3 Research Approach
We engaged in a Design Science Research (DSR) project to answer the research question and explore the potential of calm advice to resolve the relationship/decision-making tension in advisory services. In DSR, researchers and practitioners design an artifact to address a problem relevant to individuals, organizations, and societies (Hevner et al. 2004; Hevner 2007). This research addresses a relevant design problem (i.e., the relationship/decision-making tension) by building an artifact in a specific context (i.e., a Swiss regional bank). We base our research project on the DSR framework proposed by Kuechler and Vaishnavi (2008) to advance our understanding of advisory support systems and generate prescriptive knowledge in a nascent design theory (Gregor and Jones 2007). We formulated the following design goals based on the background introduced in Sect. 2. “Service” is the overarching design goal that is achieved through the “Relationship-Building” and “Decision-Making” design goals.
Main Design Goal “Service”: Improve the perceived service quality of the financial service encounter.
Sub-Design Goal 1 “Relationship-Building”: Improve the interaction quality and shared understanding.
Sub-Design Goal 2 “Decision-Making”: Improve customer orientation and satisfaction.
To achieve these design goals, we conducted three design cycles over three years to develop bankNotes – a PPUI for advisory services (Fig. 3). In the first design iteration, we developed the first prototype of bankNotes based on requirements gathered in a literature review and the analysis of 16 conventional service encounters. We evaluated the first iteration with 4 bank advisors and 16 clients. We revised and extended the design requirements in the second design cycle to accommodate the advisors’ practices. We evaluated the prototype with a focus group and follow-up interviews with four bank advisors, four clients, and two researchers to discuss the fit of bankNotes to resolve the relationship/decision-making tension. Based on the focus group’s feedback, we refined the design requirement in the third and final design cycle. The final set of design requirements was then formulated into design principles. A professional software development company developed a third prototype based on the finalized design principles. For this study, this prototype was evaluated in an experimental setting that closely replicated real-world financial service encounters.
Design cycles and research activities
4 Artifact Description – bankNotes
bankNotes aims to achieve the design goals of “Service”, “Relationship-Building”, and “Decision-Making” by resolving the relationship/decision-making tension. bankNotes applies the temporal separation strategy of resolving tensions (Poole and Ven 1989) through calm advice. Calm advice consists of calm profiling and calm decision-making and is based on paper practices and PPUI as calm technology. In calm profiling, the idea is that bankNotes is not induced with agency due to its resemblance to a conventional pen-and-paper setting. It does not distort the interaction between advisor and advisee during the relationship-building mode. Thus, calm profiling allows for improved interaction quality and shared understanding as advisors and clients can focus on their interaction while advisors profile clients. In the decision-making mode, the interlocutors benefit from the digital capabilities as bankNotes draws on the data gathered in the relationship-building. Advisors and clients can seamlessly transition to the decision-making mode without media breaks. They can engage in visual discussions enabled by digitized financial models. Thus, calm decision-making improves customer orientation and satisfaction with decisions. In summary, bankNotes resolves the relationship/decision-making tension in one system through temporal separation.
The following sections describe bankNotes in relation to the three design decisions that implemented calm advice: (1) digitizing pen-and-paper setup, (2) calm client profiling, and (3) calm decision-making. Appendix A (available online via http://link.springer.com) describes bankNotes’ architecture for the technically-versed reader.
4.1 Digitizing Pen-and-Paper Setup
Multiple studies have shown how computers alter human interactions due to their inherent agency (Pearce et al. 2009; Kilic et al. 2016; Misra et al. 2016). The perceived agency has a negative impact on relationship-building, including client profiling. Banks attempt to digitize this mode since client profiling is integral to understanding clients and is increasingly regulated by financial regulators. While it increases data persistency and regulatory compliance, clients also suddenly become aware that they are profiled. The introduction of IT raises suspicions about the necessity to collect specific information and, in extreme cases, leads to clients intervening in the encounter process (Kilic et al. 2017). In comparison, such reactions do not occur in conventional pen-and-paper encounters. The profiling is much more perceived as small talk and informal interaction as paper is free of agency and thus does not raise any concerns (Kilic et al. 2017; Dolata and Schwabe 2017).
Under consideration of paper practices and calm technology, bankNotes is designed to resemble conventional pen-and-paper-based profiling. The choice of hardware considerably influences the interaction quality (Nussbaumer et al. 2012; Pearce et al. 2012; Crampton et al. 2016). Tablets have some distinctive advantages over other hardware in advisory services, such as computers (Crampton et al. 2016): they are lightweight, portable, and unexciting. Tablets seamlessly integrate into the interaction without distracting interlocutors. Further, pens are the more overlooked artifact in a pen-and-paper setup. While there is abundant literature on the haptics of digital pens to create a natural writing experience, the understanding of the pen’s role in advisory services is limited. Our analysis of conventional encounters uncovered the importance of the pen as a subtle tool to manage the clients’ focus during the encounter (e.g., with pointing). Consequently, tablets and smart pens provide an ideal basis for bankNotes as calm technology as they are lightweight and non-obstructive.
Accordingly, bankNotes is designed to resemble a simple digital notepad on a standard tablet on which advisors can take notes with a smart pen in the relationship-building mode (see Fig. 4). The PPUI is kept this simple so as not to induce agency and draw unintended attention to bankNotes. The resemblance of bankNotes with a conventional pen-and-paper setup provides room for other artifacts such as printouts (e.g., property listings or current interest rates), pamphlets (e.g., marketing material), or any other material needed. Consequently, the advisors can engage in established practices, such as moving the smart pen towards the tablet to indicate their intention to receive the client’s information (Dolata and Schwabe 2017).
bankNotes used in a service encounter
4.2 Calm Client Profiling
bankNotes facilitates calm client profiling that is not perceived as disturbing “data collection” compared with prior IS artifacts (Kilic et al. 2017). By digitizing the pen-and-paper setup, the advisors can maintain a calm atmosphere during the profiling as they can actively listen and take notes simultaneously. While bankNotes allows advisors to maintain the pen-and-paper metaphor, it automatically populates the client profile during the interaction. bankNotes analyzes the handwriting on the digital paper, recognizes input, and saves the information in the corresponding field in the client profile. Our study of advisors’ notes in conventional encounters has shown that they often use abbreviations such as KP for Kaufpreis (asking price). bankNotes recognizes these abbreviations to assign the information to the correct data field (see Fig. 5, right). The recognition of abbreviations relies on the state-of-the-art OCR library provided by the Microsoft Windows operating system. Specifically, we use the Windows Ink Analysis Engine using an ink canvas. The characters the engine recognizes are then matched with a predefined catalog of abbreviations.
Digital notepad in bankNotes (left: blank notepad, right: notepad with client profile at the bottom)
In our example in Fig. 5 (right), the asking price of CHF 720’000 (KP) is entered in addition to the ‘Objektpreis’ (property price) as a synonym for the asking price. Furthermore, the advisors can review the collected information in the client profile by opening the corresponding section at the bottom of the interface. The client profile is categorized into the following sections: client, object (property), assets, income, and financing strategy (see red box in Fig. 5, right). The sections were derived again from our study of conventional encounters in the first design cycles. They comprise all relevant information regulators or banks require to offer a mortgage. The gathered information can be used for the subsequent decision-making mode.
In summary, bankNotes allows advisors to engage in their existing profiling practices (i.e., collect data with abbreviations). It extracts information from handwritten notes without disturbing the interaction or raising suspicion. The PPUI affords calm client profiling that maintains a casual conversation.
4.3 Calm Decision-Making
Paper fulfills the role of moving the interlocutors through the encounter and managing the interaction space (Dolata and Schwabe 2017). Advisors manage the interaction by moving paper in and out of the shared interaction space throughout the encounter. We observed an increased paper flow in the decision-making mode in conventional encounters. To make a decision, advisors and clients often start by discussing the property of interest by sharing prints of the advertisement. The advertisements commonly entail the address, asking price, floor space and plan, number of rooms, a description of the property with its amenities, and pictures. They then discuss affordability models. In conventional encounters, many advisors draw a pie chart to explain the regulatory framework to the clients. The pie represents the asking price for the property. The three slices represent the minimum assets required from clients, the total mortgage amount, and the portion clients pay back to the bank over a fixed time. Advisors and clients start discussing mortgage options only after satisfying the regulatory requirements. Finally, advisors and clients discuss financing strategies. Advisors usually explain different strategies to the client first. For example, a financing solution could contain fixed and flexible mortgages or two fixed mortgages with different durations. The choice between fixed or flexible and duration influences the interest rate for each portion. Generally, flexible and shorter mortgages have lower interest rates than fixed, long-term mortgages. Conversely, they are less exposed to fluctuations in financial markets. The advisor only calculates costs after settling on a strategy.
These complex discussions result in an increased flow of paper. Advisors introduce and withdraw paper to and from the shared interaction space. This traffic can disturb the interaction flow as advisors must draw or write on paper while clients wait for the conversation to continue. bankNotes’ calm decision-making creates a seamless transition from the relationship-building to the decision-making mode. It digitizes financial models to reduce media breaks as advisors do not have to create new artifacts (e.g., pie charts) on paper and manage the interaction space. Based on materials used or created in conventional encounters, bankNotes consists of three interactive pages: property, affordability, and financing, which enable calm decision-making.
The Property page depicts all available information about the property the client is interested in. It directly accesses the online advertisement and includes a Google Maps integration showing the property’s location and relevant infrastructures in its surroundings. Furthermore, the advisor can access pictures, floor plans, and additional information (e.g., year built, address, property type) (see Fig. 6, left). The Affordability page contains the regulatory framework as the foundation to explore mortgage options (see Fig. 6, right). The Affordability page displays an evaluation of affordability based on the information collected by the advisor during client profiling. Advisors and clients can then discuss different options that can be visualized by manipulating the parameters in the advisor-facing part of the interface (see Fig. 6, right bottom). The same principle was applied to the Financing page. bankNotes automatically calculates and visualizes a financing strategy based on the final mortgage amount on the Affordability page. Advisors and clients can see monthly or yearly costs for this option. Again, they can adjust parameters such as type of mortgage and portion of the total amount to find the ideal solution for the client’s needs (see Fig. 7).
Property (left) and affordability pages (right)
Financing page with a two-portion mortgage of fixed mortgages running 5 and 10 years
Paper allows for easy access to information by turning a page toward a person. bankNotes adopts this role as advisors can adjust the screen size and rotate the screen to provide easy access to the interaction space for the client (see Fig. 7, right; the top two-thirds are rotated). Depending on advisors’ preferences, this affords different seating options (e.g., vis-à-vis or over the edge) (Heinrich et al. 2014a). While the decision-making part of bankNotes is, strictly speaking, not a PPUI, it builds on existing paper practices to design calm visualizations of financial models that allow for seamless decision-making without media breaks between modes.
4.4 Testable Propositions
This study aims to explore PPUIs as a solution for the relationship/decision-making tension. Below, we formulate testable propositions and define measures to assess bankNotes’ suitability to achieve the three design goals in Sect. 3. Figure 8 summarizes the design goals and indicators to measure goal attendance.
Summary of design goals and goal attainment indicators
P1: The use of bankNotes improves service quality and the net promoter score compared with a conventional pen-and-paper setting.
Design goal “Service” aims to improve service quality by harmonizing relationship-building and decision-making. To achieve this goal, bankNotes combines the physical and digital world in a PPUI that allows the seamless transition between relationship-building (favoring pen-and-paper) and decision-making (favoring interactive visualizations of financing models). Goal attainment is measured using the bank service quality scale (BSQ) (Abdullah et al. 2011) and the net promoter score (NPS) (Reichheld 2003) on the client side. The advisors also evaluated the NPS.
P2: The use of bankNotes improves shared understanding of the client’s situation and the interaction quality compared with a conventional pen-and-paper setting.
The design goal “Relationship-building” aims to improve the natural interaction during client profiling. To achieve this goal, bankNotes maintains the advisors’ paper practices during relationship-building. The combination of PPUI and paper practices minimizes bankNotes’ perceived agency and, thus, does not interfere with the natural interaction between advisor and advisee. As a result, they can better focus on relationship building, achieve an improved shared understanding, and increase interaction quality. Goal attainment is measured with the interaction rating questionnaire (IRQ) (Niederhoffer and Pennebaker 2002) and the shared understanding (SU) measure (Ko et al. 2005) for the clients. The advisor assessed their perceived professional (COMPT) and social competence (COMPS) (Di Mascio 2010) in addition to shared understanding.
P3: The use of bankNotes improves customer orientation and satisfaction with the received advice compared with a conventional pen-and-paper setting.
The design goal “Decision-Making” aims to improve the decision-making process. bankNotes interactive visualizations of financing models allow the interlocutors to explore the client’s preferences as it allows rapid calculation of multiple strategies. Advisor and client can test various scenarios to determine the ideal solution for the client. As a result of this exploration, the decision-making is better oriented to the customer’s preferences and thus increases their satisfaction. Goal attainment is measured with the satisfaction instrument (YST) based on the yield shift theory of satisfaction (Briggs et al. 2008) and selling orientation-customer orientation (SOCO) scale (Thomas et al. 2001) for the clients and advisors.
5 Evaluation
5.1 Evaluation Design
This study follows the “Human Risk & Effectiveness” strategy proposed in the FEDS (Venable et al. 2016) with two earlier formative evaluations. Finally, we evaluated bankNotes in a naturalistic and summative evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the designed artifact in a near real-world setting. We evaluated in a within-subject design, where participants experienced bankNotes-supported and conventional advisory services encounters. We chose the within-subject design as it allows participants to compare both settings and assess how bankNotes influences the encounter (Mettler et al. 2014). We compared bankNotes to conventional encounters, as we designed bankNotes to digitize existing work practices in combination with new, intended behaviors to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the encounter. Advisors used little to no technology as they usually do in conventional settings. The within-subject evaluation allowed us to analyze to what extent existing work practices were supported, enhanced, or substituted with new practices. We decided against a comparison to other advisory-support systems like the mentioned AR system (Dolata et al. 2020), as bankNotes intends to digitize the pen-and-paper setup of conventional encounters. Comparing bankNotes with its natural counterpart allowed us to (A) observe if the design aligns with the underlying rationales (see Fig. 2) and (B) study if the design resolves the relationship/decision-making tension.
The evaluation took place in January and February 2018 in a local branch of a regional Swiss bank (RegioBank) to create a most naturalistic atmosphere. In the experiment, 8 advisors from RegioBank consulted 24 potential clients. Each advisor consulted three clients in a conventional and bankNotes-supported encounter. The clients experienced both settings in a randomized order and could compare bankNotes to a conventional encounter in the concluding interviews. The advisors had the opportunity to compare both settings and use bankNotes in three encounters, improving their ability to assess the design deeply. Before the evaluation, they received a half-day training on bankNotes, where they learned about the system’s capabilities and tested it in role plays with their colleagues.
The participants received a handout that included information about their financial situation and the property they were interested in. They were not given further instructions (e.g., a persona), allowing them to experience the encounter as naturally as possible. The participants were recruited through an advertisement on the university’s official website, which is available to the broader public. The average age was 31, with the youngest participant being 21 and the oldest being 62 years old. 10 out of 24 participants were female. The cohort came from different backgrounds, including social workers, biologists, and office clerks. The participants received a compensation of CHF 70 (approx. $70) for 2.5 h.
5.2 Data Analysis
We applied a multi-method approach for the data analysis to comprehensively understand bankNote’s effects on the encounter (Mingers 2001). This approach allowed us to study how bankNotes facilitates relationship-building while supporting decision-making with financing models. During the evaluation, we collected three types of data to validate our design principles and propositions: (1) 48 video recordings of service encounters; (2) semi-structured interviews with 24 clients and 8 advisors (audio recorded and intelligent-verbatim transcription). The clients were interviewed after experiencing both treatments (average of 39 min). The advisors were interviewed at the end of the evaluation day (average of 61 min); (3) a survey for clients and advisors filled out after each encounter (see Sect. 4.4 for measures).
We carried out the data analysis in two steps. First, we analyzed the video recordings of the conventional and bankNotes-supported encounters. In an initial step, we encoded the conventional encounters based on the phases of financial service encounters proposed by Dolata and Schwabe (2017) (organizing, exchanging, offering choice, closing phase) to validate the paper practices and refine the coding schema. The phases provide a nuanced division of the encounter, including the applied paper practices per phase. In a second round, we encoded the bankNotes-supported encounters. While coding for existing practices, we also identified the effects of the technology on the practices, the use of interaction space, and emerging practices. We formalized the observed practices in the bankNotes-supported encounters in thinkLets proposed by Briggs and De Vreede (2009). This first step allowed us to study the effect of bankNotes on the advisors’ practices. We could compare the existing paper practices with bankNotes practices and identify changes and the emergence of new practices.
Second, we analyzed the survey and interview data to study the effects of bankNotes on the perception of the encounters. We started by analyzing the survey data applying basic statistical analysis. We calculated mean and median values, standard deviations, variance, and standard error of the mean value. Furthermore, we conducted two-tailed t-tests to test the significance of the differences between the conventional and bankNotes-supported encounters. The statistics formed the basis for the qualitative analysis, where we applied thematic coding (Clarke et al. 2015) in search of explanations for the identified differences between conventional and bankNotes-supported encounters. For this, we first deductively developed a coding schema based on the results of the survey analysis and related work. The interviews were coded in the first iteration using the coding schema. We inductively adapted the coding schema and applied it to the interviews in a second round of analysis (Mayring 2004). Finally, the author group discussed the results in a sense-making workshop. In this workshop, we combined the results of the two-step analysis to interpret the effects of bankNotes on the advisors’ practices and answer our research question.
5.3 Findings
We first present findings comparing conventional and bankNotes-supported encounters focusing on practices. These observations provide insights into bankNotes’ capability to bridge client profiling and joint problem-solving. Second, we draw on quantitative and qualitative data to validate our design principles by testing the propositions introduced in Sect. 4.4.
5.3.1 Adoption of bankNotes in the Advisors’ Work Practices
The video analysis of the encounters shows little disturbance in the advisors’ conventional practices when using bankNotes. The advisors blend in the tablet like a notepad, placing it covered in front of themselves at the beginning of the encounter. Some advisors placed other materials (e.g., printed interest rates table) next to the tablet while all dispense of their calculators or do not use them in the encounter. Half of the advisors utilize the – formerly printed-out – marketing material available in bankNotes when presenting themselves and RegioBank. All advisors take notes directly in bankNotes predominantly by using the digital notepad. Writing directly in data fields is only used when adapting numbers like income during affordability and financing discussions. In the beginning, the tablet remains in the private space of the advisor, like the physical notepad. Neither the advisors nor the clients show any significant signs of disturbance through the technology except general interest in the beginning. Advisors frequently take up the client’s interest to quickly demonstrate the workings of bankNotes (i.e., structuring information based on their notes). Additionally, the advisors navigate very little between the pages and strongly focus on the client (e.g., non-verbal communication such as nodding and eye contact). Furthermore, our analysis elicits four significant changes in practices induced by bankNotes.
First, the advisors utilize the property page shown in Fig. 7. In the conventional encounter, the interlocutors seldom discuss the property. The clients bring a printout of the property listing and sometimes hand the copy to the advisor. They quickly look at the document and place it next to the notepad. In the bankNotes-supported encounter, the advisors place the tablet in the shared interaction space and evaluate the property with the client. They look at the infrastructure in proximity to the property (e.g., grocery stores, schools, busy streets). The advisors offer their judgment of the property based on the images available and point out advantages (e.g., evening sun on the terrace) and disadvantages (e.g., old appliances).
Second, the advisors change their information providing practice when advising with bankNotes. In a conventional setting, the advisors first explain the regulatory requirements for affordability to qualify for a mortgage. They either verbally explain the requirements without visual help, use brochures or factsheets, or draw a framework (i.e., a pie chart and a house). Once the clients have understood the requirements, they ask for their preferences regarding the assets used to calculate the affordability (e.g., personal savings over inheritance). The advisors manually calculate one option using the calculator and a piece of paper in her personal space while the client waits for the discussion to continue. The same repeats once affordability is guaranteed, and the advisor calculates one option for a financing strategy. With bankNotes, the advisors employ a different strategy to provide the necessary information: The advisors display the default affordability assessment automatically calculated by bankNotes (see Fig. 7). The advisors manipulate the calculation by changing the net assets (e.g., excluding cash savings) to demonstrate rather than explain the regulatory requirements. They use the smart pen to draw their client’s attention to specific information on the page (e.g., the split between own assets and mortgage; see red box in Fig. 5). Once the client understands the general requirements, the advisors calculate more options and discuss the advantages and disadvantages with their clients. They also include hypothetical scenarios like a significant increase in interest rates and different strategies to mitigate risks. The clients tend to ask for more calculations to explore the effects of different investment amounts and appear more invested in the discussion (e.g., bowed over the tablet instead of reclined in the chair). The interlocutors explore the cost effects based on varying mortgage durations and types (i.e., fixed or flexible mortgages) and even split the mortgage into partitions with different durations and types.
Third, the advisors are more willing to hand over information to the clients. The tablet is mainly in the shared interaction space and is visually and haptically accessible to the client. While the clients seldom try to manipulate the visualizations, the advisors openly communicate what they are doing (e.g., reducing the amount of cash savings invested by the client to demonstrate the effects). As a result, the communication does not halt during the adjustment. The client is more involved than in the conventional encounter, where the advisors rarely explain while calculating or hand over the paper to the client. On the contrary, the advisors proactively offer the clients to send the complete documentation via e-mail in the bankNotes-supported encounter.
Lastly, we observed a blending of the relationship-building and decision-making modes in the bankNotes-supported encounters. Conventional encounters follow the course Dolata and Schwabe (2017) elicited. In contrast, advisors and clients switch back and forth between the relationship-building and decision-making mode when using bankNotes. The interlocutors are in a constant mode of sharing and receiving information by exploring preferences, the effects of changes in the asset mix and financing strategy, and potential future events such as changing interest rates.
In summary, bankNotes successfully supports the interlocutors during the encounter without disturbing the natural interaction. Advisors almost entirely rely on bankNotes as it combines traditional, human-oriented practices with digitized, solution-oriented approaches. Only a few advisors retain some remnants of “physical” practices, like introducing themselves and the bank with printout marketing materials.
5.3.2 Evaluation of the Goal Attainment by bankNotes
In the following section, we present our findings regarding goal attendance of bankNotes, as outlined in Sect. 4.4. Table 1 summarizes the quantitative findings from the client survey, and Table 2 focuses on the advisor survey.
P1: The use of bankNotes improves service quality and the net promoter score compared with a conventional setting.
The survey shows a positive effect of bankNotes on the client’s perceived encounter quality. Bank service quality increased significantly (+ 13.4%) compared with the conventional setting. The net promoter score also increased by 19.3%. However, this improvement is not significant. On the advisors’ side, they heavily favored bankNotes over conventional pen-and-paper encounters (NPS, + 29.71%).
Both sides showed a positive attitude toward bankNotes in the interviews and see an added value without disturbing the personal exchange. Many clients appreciate the better visibility of the encounter’s structure without the impression that the advisors would follow a standardized process. All advisors confirm the clients’ perceptions. They do not feel pressured to follow a linear process induced by bankNotes. On the contrary, the advisors appreciate the structure as a memento while still being flexible enough to move back and forth in the encounter. Further, the advisors highlight the natural method for data input as a valuable capability. It allows them to open the notepad, note down important information, and make it available throughout the encounter without manual retrieval. Finally, both parties highly praise the visualizations as they are central to collaboratively arriving at a suitable solution. The advisors further appreciate the documentation, including a concrete offering and open tasks for finalizing the financing:
It seems very important to me that the client can walk out with a document that gives him a reference point: what does it look like for me, is affordability a given, and so on? […] And in many cases, there are documents missing, so I can also mark right away what they still must send me to get the financing things done. (Advisor A7).
Against this background, we conclude that the clients and advisors support P1. BankNotes successfully bridges the two modes in the encounter.
P2 The use of bankNotes improves shared understanding of the client’s situation and the interaction quality compared with a conventional setting.
Clients perceived an improved shared understanding (+ 7.1%) and interaction quality (+ 4.3%) compared with the conventional encounter. Furthermore, they could better realize unexpressed needs (BSQ Item 20; + 18.4%) in the bankNotes-supported encounter. Simultaneously, the advisors perceived a significant increase in their professional and social competence (CMPT + 9.62% and CMPS + 4.41%), while the shared understanding improved slightly in the bankNotes-supported encounter (+ 1.34%).
The interviews uncovered a clear explanation for these positive effects. First, the Property page in bankNotes excites the clients. Many of them report the feeling that the advisor is interested in them and their situation. The advisors appeared better prepared for the consultation, inspiring trust in their capabilities. In general, the advisors were able to connect with their clients on a more personal level by showing interest in the property and their client’s needs, adding a personal touch to the encounter:
Yes, so I think if you buy an apartment, you have certainly been there before, and yes, but I also found it simply more personal because [the advisor] just looks at [the property] again with her trained eye because I think she probably sells apartments very often, she just sees something immediately. Maybe in the best case, she even knows the city, knows the neighborhoods, knows there is maybe something being built, a highway somewhere nearby; I found that a lot more personal. (Client C21).
The advisors paint a very similar picture. They all appreciate the possibility of reviewing the property’s surroundings and providing their insights. They report that the functionality helps break the ice and motivates the clients to talk more about themselves and their needs. One advisor also mentions that he perceives the clients as more outgoing, which in turn helps him gather more personal information and ultimately understand the clients and their needs better (Advisor A3).
Second, the Affordability and Financing pages delighted the clients and advisors and created a valuable collaboration space. The clients appreciated the proactive calculation of multiple options and the reduced waiting time. The reduction of interaction breakdowns and the ease of calculating additional options open room for the clients to ask questions and give inputs. Client C6, for example, mentioned that “[bankNotes] simply gave me the feeling that I can collaborate. That I have a say through my ideas. In the [conventional] consultation, [the advisor] always just wrote something on the paper and then showed it to me afterward.” The clients often say the visualizations help them to formulate their wishes better and feel less like observers and more like equal partners. Additionally, many clients report that malleability allows the advisors to explain the subject matter better, including the regulations and consequences of options. They perceive discussing hypothetical scenarios (e.g., working part-time instead of full-time) as an effective method to acquire the necessary knowledge to make informed decisions. Client C14 even said: “I always feel so sorry for the consultants when they then must recalculate everything on paper. With [bankNotes], everything is done very easily and quickly.”
The advisors also express great appreciation for the relief from manual calculations. The communication breakdowns during the calculations pressure them to either interact with the client in some form or hurry up to reduce the waiting time. BankNotes helps them manage their clients’ focus as they can rely on their existing practices using their pen. In the encounters, the advisors rarely put the smart pen aside, using it for writing and guiding their clients’ focus. They do so by pointing at specific areas in bankNotes, such as the bar chart in the Affordability visualization (see Fig. 7, right). In turn, this focus management allows the clients to understand the subject matter better and express their preferences as described above. Many advisors believe their clients feel better understood as bankNotes enables the interlocutors to test various scenarios in a client’s life (e.g., one salary instead of two or any other reductions in total income). They also experience less reluctance to ask for more options or explanations, which the advisors accredit to the fact that the calculations are effortless. Advisor A6 summarizes it as follows:
I have to say, [the manual calculation] is actually just an artificial environment when you’re being watched. […] I can already fill in certain things [in bankNotes] when I already have the information. And I can play with it much easier. If I am now using the calculator and [calculate] options, like “calculate me quickly if I go down to 80% with the income or how is it now at 10 years.” Then I must always enter it and calculate it. And I can do that much more easily [with bankNotes]. That’s the clearest added value for me.
Against this background, we conclude that the clients and advisors support P2. BankNotes allows for better eliciting the clients’ preferences and improves the advisors’ perceived competence.
P3: The use of bankNotes improves customer orientation and satisfaction with the received advice compared with a conventional setting.
The clients rated customer orientation (+ 6.3%) and satisfaction with the received advice (+ 15.9%) in bankNotes-supported encounters significantly higher than in conventional encounters. Again, the advisors rated their bankNotes-supported encounters only slightly better regarding customer orientation (+ 3.07%) and satisfaction with the advice given (+ 0.25%).
In the interviews, the clients remembered the advisors as interested and accommodating. Only a few mentioned bankNotes explicitly when talking about the relationship-building mode. However, most expressed general interest in the technology rather than suspicion as in prior studies. They perceived a general interest in them and their situation and did not feel like being treated as “just another case.” The advisors would listen carefully and strive for a personal connection with the clients. Most clients see increased interaction between them and the advisors with more eye contact, which adds a more personal note to the bankNotes-supported encounter. Client C13 explains this with the effortless information input modality in bankNotes (i.e., handwriting). Many appreciate the physical appearance of bankNotes (i.e., on a tablet) as it leaves room for other material that seamlessly fits into the interaction space. Interestingly, some clients report they expected the technology to disturb the interaction during the encounter but are positively surprised:
Yes, because I had the feeling that if you have this tablet, then you keep looking at it, and at first, I had the feeling that it is disturbing in the conversation. But I’ve now noticed that you have more space for information. You don’t have to do all the calculations by hand. […] It is like a process that falls away, where the advisor can now concentrate on other things more important in the conversation. And I didn’t expect that; I expected it to be very focused on the tablet. But it was very different. (Client C18).
Nevertheless, some clients still prefer physical paper, which feels more natural and does not draw as much attention to it as a tablet.
On the advisors’ side, they welcomed digital note-taking very much as it easily integrates into their existing practices. Advisor A4 praises the notepad look of bankNotes as “it is no distraction neither for me nor for the client”. Additionally, digital notes eliminate cumbersome post-processing, where advisors must transfer their handwritten notes to the banking system. Only two advisors do not fully enjoy writing in bankNotes since the feeling is not the same as in actual pen-and-paper writing. Further, bankNotes’ paper-like design helps the advisors maintain a natural interaction. For example, Advisor A2 leverages the resemblance to divert the focus away from the tablet:
You also hide [the technology] again so that only the notepad is shown, and if only the notepad is shown, there is, of course, nothing interesting to see. That’s how you maintain more eye contact. I think it always depends on how you use the tablet, how often you’ve used it, and that’s how you can actually restore interpersonal contact.
The advisors like the notepad design as it provides room for conventional pen-and-paper input, such as drawings or a fact sheet next to the tablet, to support their discussions. They often place printed interest rate tables next to bankNotes in their calculations.
Against this background, we conclude that the clients and advisors support P3. Both are more satisfied with the outcome and perceive the result as more customer-oriented.
6 Discussion
This study addresses the research question of how digitizing pen-and-paper practices can improve relationship-building and decision-making in advisory services. We address this question by designing and evaluating bankNotes for financial service encounters by drawing on paper practices and calm technology as our kernel theories. Our results show that the advisors successfully adopt bankNotes with minimal friction when engaging in their pen-and-paper practices. BankNotes-supported encounters provide a better service experience for advisees and advisors than conventional encounters. Through temporal separation, bankNotes achieves both goals in an advisory encounter: support relationship-building and decision-making. This study makes a two-fold contribution: First, we propose calm advice as a new perspective for research on advisory-support systems. Second, we propose design knowledge for calm advice grounded in paper practices and calm technology.
6.1 Theoretical Implications for Advisory-Support Systems
Prior studies on advisory-support systems can be characterized in three waves. In the first wave, systems introduced standardized process models to enhance transparency in encounters (Nussbaumer et al. 2012). However, many advisors refused these systems as they were perceived as too restrictive. We argue that previous systems underestimated the role of paper and pen in advisory services and abstracted from the rationales that explain the preference for those tools as opposed to seemingly modern and effective IT support. BankNotes offers an alternative that financial advisors have readily adopted. In the following, we propose calm advice as a new paradigm for designing advisory-support systems in three design principles. Calm advice is a paradigm that (a) supports existing practices, (b) provides support that aligns with rationales behind existing practices, and (c) enables new behaviors that can contribute to the improvement of the advisory service quality.
6.1.1 Principle of Digitized Pen-and-Paper Practices: Provide a Digital Piece of Paper and a Pen to Facilitate Natural Communication.
This general general design principle will be elaborated in more detail further below. Previous findings indicate that satisfaction with advisory services is strongly related to the perception of the encounter as a non-technical, personal encounter (Kilic et al. 2016; Dolata and Schwabe 2017). Accordingly, we claim technology should remain in the background as much as possible during an advisory encounter. To achieve this, calm advice borrows from research on calm technology and links it with existing paper practices in advisory encounters. BankNotes is designed to digitize a conventional pen-and-paper setup to be non-intrusive and remain in the periphery of its users to foster personal interaction (Riekki et al. 2004; Brown et al. 2017). The digitized setup is aligned with the advisors’ underlying rationales for their paper practices, resulting in effortless appropriation of bankNotes without visible disturbance.
To this day, advisors often prefer a conventional pen-and-paper setting that allows them to build a connection with their clients. Existing literature has uncovered the role of pen and paper beyond an unintrusive tool for financial advice. It serves as a tool for impression management, communicating institutional roles, and expressing individuality (Dolata and Schwabe 2017). Designing advisory-support systems as PPUIs affords the same functions, which creates a calming effect on clients and advisors (Steimle 2009; Brown et al. 2017). Our video analysis shows how advisors effortlessly integrate bankNotes into their practices and focus strongly on their clients while taking notes. Consequently, bankNotes does not intrude on the delicate relationship-building mode, where the advisors aim to create an instant personal connection. The technology does not draw attention away from the social exchange as it seamlessly integrates into the ecosystem. The digital notepad allows the advisors to maintain a casual atmosphere while starting with client profiling. BankNotes facilitates a smooth transition from an informal exchange (e.g., small talk) to a formal discussion due to the paper-like design. Accordingly, clients and advisors rate the overall bank service quality significantly higher and would recommend bankNotes-supported encounters much more likely than conventional encounters.
In summary, advisors would often rather refrain from using IT than risk losing the connection with their clients (Kilic et al. 2016). Consequently, they must later transfer data into the CRM system for regulatory purposes and create a mortgage offer to clients. BankNotes successfully integrates into the dyadic interaction by maintaining paper practices and adhering to calm design. In other words, the expectations for client profiling often remain the same as in the twentieth century. However, the expectations toward customer experience have drastically changed in the twenty-first century. They expect to be deeply involved in the decision-making process, thus creating the relationship/decision-making tension. From this perspective, bankNotes bridges the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by digitizing the conventional pen-and-paper setup to facilitate natural communication. Table 3 summarizes the principle of digitized pen-and-paper practices.
6.1.2 Principle of Calm Profiling: Capture and Digitize Key Information in the Background Using Established Practices to Facilitate Calm Client Profiling.
The conversation should focus on the client and their needs in the relationship-building mode. Profiling activities should not distract from the conversation, for example, through behaviors (e.g., typing information into a system) or visualizations. Frequently, profiling involves longer client statements with occasional questions from advisors who collect relevant information (Kilic et al. 2016). Previous systems aimed to enable advisors to build a connection with their clients and gather regulatory-required information simultaneously. However, these systems had adverse effects (Kilic et al. 2017). IT possesses agency that raises suspicion on the client side and alters the conversation dynamic (Kilic et al. 2016). Accordingly, pen and paper often remain the gold standards for relationship-oriented dyadic interactions. Advisors prefer a conventional pen-and-paper setting that allows them to build a connection with their clients.
Instead of forcing advisors to adapt their profiling practices to gather structured data, bankNotes allows them to keep their practices. Calm profiling introduces seamless tools that support the collection of client information without changing the interaction dynamics. In contrast to previous research, bankNotes neither explicates profiling activities nor coerces advisors and clients to gather a predefined set of information (Kilic et al. 2015, 2016). It captures and digitizes key information from handwritten notes. As a result, the principle of calm profiling foregrounds the interaction by pushing the tool to the background. Our video analysis revealed that advisors could indeed profile their clients with bankNotes while maintaining a casual conversation. Like a piece of paper, the smart pen and digital notepad do not inflict the interaction with agency of their own. On the contrary, clients perceive that bankNotes provides more room to share information and that the advisors can focus more on them. This is reflected in the surveys and interviews. BankNotes positively influences interaction quality as advisors and clients pay attention to each other. The resulting mutual and clear communication increases shared understanding.
In summary, bankNotes’ PPUI parts balance preserving the fragile connection and leveraging technology for financial advice by foregrounding the interaction. The natural behavior (i.e., note-taking with pen and paper) keeps the technology in the users’ peripheries, resulting in calm profiling (Brown et al. 2017; Stankov and Filimonau 2019). Table 4 summarizes the principle of calm profiling.
6.1.3 Principle of Calm Decision-Making: Digitize and Seamlessly Integrate Financial Models to Align the Solution to Client Needs
When moving to the decision-making mode, bankNotes seamlessly integrated digitized financial models. It reduces media breaks by populating these models with client information gathered in the relationship-building mode to display an initial affordability or financing option. Advisors can seamlessly move to decision-making instead of educating clients about regulatory requirements first before calculating an option. The seamlessness allows advisors to integrate bankNotes into continuous practices that keep the technology in the background as it foregrounds the client’s preferences and the property of interest.
banNotes allows for continued calmness in the decision-making mode. Existing research has demonstrated how combining the physical and digital worlds in an AR system can support decision-making (Dolata et al. 2020). However, AR potentially introduces disturbance through its projections and physical presence. Our findings show that PPUIs have a calming effect on users due to their low agency. The PPUI part of bankNotes establishes a calm environment during the relationship-building mode. Maintaining at least parts of the pen-and-paper metaphor in the decision-making mode retains the calming effects on clients and advisors. For example, advisors guide clients’ attention with the pen, which resembles a natural behavior. Consequently, we argue that PPUIs lay the foundation for calm decision-making.
Furthermore, it is not only the non-intrusive character of PPUIs that enables calm decision-making. To optimally complete decision-making, required data must be available at hand or produced without visible effort. Decision-making involves continuous exchange between advisor and advisee on the advantages and disadvantages of a particular decision and its alignment with client needs (Jungermann 1999; Heinrich and Schwabe 2018). Therefore, access to relevant information for this discussion is central. BankNotes digitizes relevant financial models on the Property, Affordability, and Financing pages to reduce breaks in the conversation and media usage (e.g., by inserting and withdrawing paper from the shared interaction space). These pages allow advisors to offer a continuous progression of the encounter. They can engage in their existing practices that are improved by bankNotes. For example, advisors and clients can explore various options for affordability and financing strategies instead of only calculating one option each. In calm decision-making settings, calculating and comparing an additional option only requires seconds instead of minutes with a calculator device. Accordingly, calm decision-making from this perspective is less about the disturbance introduced by technology but the break in the discussion. After manually calculating an option, advisors must regain their client’s attention before they continue. Calm decision-making offers easy access to multiple options and affords their comparison. Table 5 summarizes the principle of calm decision-making.
In summary, the calm advice paradigm suggests using tools and resources that adapt to the mode of interaction between the advisor and advisee. We claim this adaptation creates a calm environment where the tools are only as visible as necessary. In phases that require focusing on the client, the visibility of the systems is reduced as much as possible, and conventional practices are foregrounded. In decision-making, the system forfeits parts of the pen-and-paper metaphor to offer interactive financial models. Decision-making is supported with just-in-time information that allows for effortless exploration of various options to find the ideal solution for a client.
6.2 Practical Implications for Advisory-Support Systems
Calm advice as a new paradigm for designing advisory-support systems has practical implications for multiple stakeholders.
Designers benefit from our insights on how to combine the “PP” and “UI” in one “PPUI” that resolves the relationship/decision-making tension. BankNotes creates a calm environment by allowing advisors to engage in their perfectioned practices in the relationship-building mode (Principle of digitized pen-and-paper practices). Simultaneously, advisors “magically” profile their clients (Principle of calm profiling). The principle of calm decision-making is about revealing the “magic” that happened in the principle of calm profiling. While retaining part of the pen-and-paper metaphor, bankNotes seamlessly integrates digitized financial models for decision-making. We argue that designers gain insights into two aspects of calm advice through our proposed design principles. First, designing for rationales supports advisors to maintain a natural flow in service encounters and allows more efficient and effective practices to emerge. As outlined in Sect. 2.1, rationales are an individual’s targets and desires that shape their practices. Practice theory provides the toolset to study current behaviors and explicate the rationales that underlie these practices (Scollon 2002; Nicolini 2012). A deep understanding of the problem space allows designers to anticipate the effect of their design on current behavior and plan for future behavior aligned with the rationales. Considering such rationales increases the likelihood of the system’s adoption as the current and intended behavior fit seamlessly together, like puzzle pieces (see Fig. 2). Second, calm technology bridges the contrasting requirements in the relationship-building and decision-making modes. BankNotes foregrounds personal interaction in relationship-building while capturing and digitizing relevant information. It leverages this information in interactive financial models for decision-making to enable the discussion.
Financial institutions benefit from calm advice as it simultaneously addresses the needs of bank managers and advisors. Bank managers strive for standardization of advisory processes to mitigate regulatory risks. BankNotes automatically gathers the relevant data and, thereby, reduces documentation efforts. Further, it enables advisors to engage in their perfected practices. The pen-and-paper part of bankNotes allows them to focus on building a relationship with their clients. In the decision-making mode, the three pages in bankNotes provide room for new practices in line with the advisors’ rationales that foster customer orientation and lead to more satisfaction with the result. The Property page successfully unfolds the “UI” characteristics of bankNotes. It soothes the transition from “small talk” to “business talk” as it leverages the property as a transition artifact. Discussing the property combines the problem and solution space as it is the centerpiece of the client’s problem (i.e., how do I finance the property?) and the starting point for exploring the solution options. Despite the soothing effect, the Property page clearly signals a progression in the encounter, providing an anchor for the clients to anticipate the transition. The Affordability and Financing pages provide the interlocutors with shared mental models. The pages foster the collaborative development of multiple options, helping them elicit the clients’ unexpressed needs. BankNotes encourages the exploration of scenarios and their effects on the affordability and costs of a solution. The interlocutors benefit from embedding bankNotes in the ecosystem as the advisor can introduce supporting artifacts to the interaction space to explain the cause and effects of specific scenarios. The smart pen supports the advisor in guiding the client’s focus to important aspects that need consideration.
Finally, our study has shown that clients benefit from bankNotes as well. They receive the undivided attention of the advisors as expected from conventional encounters. Further, they benefit from decision support offered in bankNotes’ visualization. As a result, clients perceive better interaction quality and personalization in the encounters, which results in tailored decisions.
7 Conclusions and Limitations
This study provides validated design guidelines for a PPUI to resolve the persisting relationship-building/decision-making tension. We demonstrate the importance of understanding the rationales behind observable practices as they can inform a more successful design of IS artifacts. As of today, bankNotes has been turned into a production system by an external company and is regularly used by RegioBank. Their advisors have freedom of choice and can use it whenever they see it “fits” the conversation. The bank also offers the system as a product to other banks in Switzerland. The production system follows the design presented in this paper.
BankNotes resolves the relationship/decision-making tension by combining the advantages of pen and paper (i.e., the “PP”) with technology (i.e., the “UI”). Existing research on IT-supported advisory services often emphasizes the “UI” over the “PP”. For example, the aim to increase transparency with a new system forced advisors to adhere to a predefined practice of sharing information with their clients, leading to unnatural interactions (Nussbaumer et al. 2012). Often, the introduced systems hamper the advisors’ interaction with clients. The clients register these nuanced differences as the advisors focus more on the system (Kilic et al. 2016) or cannot engage in their usual practices (Nussbaumer et al. 2012). A recent study of a mixed-realty system called LivePaper demonstrates the potential of PPUIs (Dolata et al. 2020). However, such systems are costly, do not support mobile services, and potentially introduce excitement and disturbance.
BankNotes maintains existing pen-and-paper practices and facilitates new practices that align with the underlying rationales. This combination provides a superior experience through calm advice. It bridges the relationship-building and decision-making modes. The “PP” half of bankNotes allows advisors to rely on their established and perfectioned practices grounded in their aim to establish a personal relationship and manage their clients’ focus to elicit their needs and arrive at a shared understanding. The”UI” half of bankNotes taps into the advantages of calm technology to empower advisors to excel in their provided service quality.
Despite the successful implementation in practice, this study has limitations. First, while the evaluation resembled a real-world advisory encounter, the participants were not actual clients wanting a mortgage. Future research could evaluate the production system based on bankNotes to replicate the results. Second, the sample size only allows for the observation of strong effects in cases where the large majority exhibited similar tendencies. A larger sample size could further improve the external validity of our findings. Finally, this study focuses on a specific form of financial advice (i.e., mortgages). Mortgage advice-giving usually does not result in a comparable client-advisor relationship as compared with, for example, investment advice. This might have implications for the generalizability of our findings. However, we believe that our findings are generalizable across most advisory services, which are (1) one-time encounters and (2) initial encounters for long-term relationships. Regardless of the context, advisors must be able to bridge relationship-building and decision-making early on. Future research should investigate the applicability of calm advice in other advisory services, such as investment advice and medical consultations (Färber et al. 2019).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our project partners, Hypothekarbank Lenzburg AG (HBL) and bmpi AG. We thank HBL for the fruitful collaboration in developing and evaluating Banknotes, especially Mehmet Kilic, Stephan Weber, and the eight financial advisors. We thank bmpi AG for the implementation of our design ideas. Finally, we want to acknowledge the valuable contributions of four students as part of their Bachelor’s and Master’s theses at the University of Zurich. We thank Pascal Zehnder and Manuel Schlegel for their contribution to bankNotes’ design and Desirée Blass and Gian Walter for their support in the data analysis.
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Accepted after two revisions by Shirley Gregor.
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Staehelin, D., Dolata, M. & Schwabe, G. Calm Advice: How Digitalizing Pen-and-Paper Practices Improves Financial Advice-Giving. Bus Inf Syst Eng (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-024-00879-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-024-00879-2