When Marius Hauken, Chief Experience Officer at Heder Bank, joined the company, the mission was ambitious: build a modern bank from the ground up.
Hauken leads both technology and user experience during the bank’s transformation. His responsibilities span design, product development, technology, user testing, and customer insights, a broad scope for a lean organization.
“We’re a very small team that has built a lot in a very short time,” Hauken explains. “We’ve essentially turned a traditional banking setup upside down and started rebuilding the technology platform from scratch.”
With only three people working on product, the team is responsible for design, development, product setup, and the overall technology platform. That leaves little time for manual analysis of customer feedback, even though understanding users is critical.
“We need insights into customer feedback and patterns from customer service to understand what’s happening. But with such a small team, we don’t have much time to process that manually.”
That’s where Pilea comes in.
Earlier in his career, Hauken relied heavily on structured user testing to understand customers.
At previous companies such as Sbanken, and Bulder Bank, monthly usability testing sessions were a core part of the product development process.
“One of the success factors in those organizations was continuous user testing. It helped us catch issues early.”
But at Heder Bank, the reality is different. With a small team focused on launching key banking services, including savings accounts and mortgages, there simply isn’t time to run the same insight processes.
Without a tool like Pilea, the team would largely rely on anecdotal input from customer service.
“We wouldn’t have had much overview of what customers were actually saying. We would have had to depend on customer service summaries and take that at face value.”
By connecting Pilea to Intercom, their support platform, the Heder Bank team can now track patterns in customer conversations and feedback automatically.
Instead of relying on scattered information, they receive structured insights and weekly reports that highlight emerging themes.
“Pilea helps us keep our heads above water when it comes to insights,” says Hauken. “We get weekly reports that help us focus on the areas we should prioritize in our pipeline.”
The biggest shift is the ability to quantify customer feedback.
“Now we can see how many customers are actually saying something. We have facts in Pilea. We can quantify feedback and prioritize based on what is really happening.”
This also helps the team validate assumptions about what customers care about most.
“Customer service might feel like they get a lot of questions about one thing, but when you look at the data, there might actually be more questions about something else. Pilea helps us see the real trends.”
Another key benefit is the ability to collect feedback from multiple sources into a single overview.
Currently, Heder Bank has connected Pilea to Intercom, but plans to integrate additional tools as their feedback ecosystem grows.
“We want to bring insights from multiple channels into one place so we can see real trends over time.”
For a bank handling sensitive customer data, security is also critical. Pilea’s PII redaction capability ensures that personal data is automatically removed from feedback before analysis.
“Because we’re a bank, it’s extremely important that no customer data is exposed. PII redaction is critical for us so we can stay in control of sensitive information.”
Even with a small team, the insights generated by Pilea are already being used beyond product development.
Hauken has used screenshots and visualizations from Pilea in presentations to the bank’s board to illustrate what customers are saying.
“We’ve used Pilea data in reporting to the board, showing where customers give the most feedback and what topics are trending.”
Right now, the team is focused on delivering core banking services. But once the initial platform is fully launched, customer insight will become even more important.
“We’re in delivery mode at the moment. But once the core services are out, understanding customer feedback will be critical for deciding where we go next.”
For Heder Bank, Pilea provides a lightweight but powerful way to stay connected to customers, without adding complexity or headcount.
“It gives us the pulse of what’s happening with our customers. And for a small team like ours, that’s incredibly valuable.”
Marius Hauken
Heder Bank automated customer insights with Pilea, moving from anecdotal feedback to quantified data - enabling their lean team to make faster, more confident product decisions.
We keep things light when it comes to sorting your feedback. When it comes to protecting your data? That's where we get serious.
Pilea is built in Norway 🇳🇴, hosted in the EU 🇪🇺 and scalable to product teams globally 🌍.
