Enhancing end-to-end customer journey on sale of Saudi home mortgages

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going through a period of change as the country strives to meet its Vision 2030 development goals. A key part of this involves increasing home ownership, which stood at 50% when Vision 2030 was launched in 2016, to 70% by 2030.

The challenges that existed in the market were wide-ranging, including: misalignments in government policy, a lack of incentives for investors and general unaffordability for many citizens. The creation of solutions to effectively link prospective homeowners with financiers is therefore central to the kingdom’s overarching development goals.

The Saudi Arabian home market has been expanding, with retail real-estate loans from commercial banks reaching SAR174 billion (USD46 billion) as of Q3 2019, up from SAR130 billion (USD34.6 billion) a year earlier. The market also faced a rise in competition from bank and non-bank providers.

Facing this context, a large mortgage financing company commissioned Genesis to help enhance its customer value proposition (CVP). The mortgage financing company had taken an innovative, digitally driven approach to issuing mortgage loans to borrowers, and sought to ensure that its offering was properly aligned with customer expectations. The aim was to ensure the development of a winning customer journey that would allow the client to establish itself as the leading provider of mortgages.

Genesis began by forming a thorough understanding of the Saudi Arabian market context, as well as the competitive landscape surrounding the client. We then worked closely with the company, conducting in-depth interviews with senior and middle management, as well as staff members and customers, to form a complete understanding of the business’s approach and its associated strengths and challenges.

Using insights gained from these interviews, we developed detailed customer-journey maps across all of the client’s targeted customer profiles and product offerings. We identified pain points in these customer journeys and how they impact the customer’s overall experience while obtaining a mortgage. We employed applied behavioural economics principles to ensure we identified the contextual factors that affected consumers’ decision making. Through these we were able to map the firm’s value propositions against the needs and perceptions of its customers.

Based on the findings from the analysis, we developed a set of operational recommendations to alleviate the pain points identified across the various customer journeys. Our final set of recommendations spanned all stages of the customer’s engagement with our client: i.e. from initial contact to the ongoing relationship while the mortgage was repaid.

The recommendations were combined into an implementation roadmap that set out how the initiatives should be sequenced and how to measure the level of success on each initiative. The recommendations and implementation plan were presented to the client’s executive team, ensuring buy-in from senior management and providing a roadmap for the company on how to ensure that it meets the needs of customers at each step of their journey.