Helping a billion dollar company reignite growth
How does a billion dollar revenue company re-ignite growth when market share has been slipping for some time? We worked with this large Agricultural company to arm them with the confidence to navigate their challenging business environments and start to grow again.
Using Structured Customer Understanding to Grow
Our Agriculture Client’s mission statement is to improve global food security by enabling millions of farmers to make better use of their available resources.
When it came to improving their grower’s experience, they sought us out as a leader in structured customer understanding to provide clarity and direction for the deployment of their own resources.
Integrating into their structure, we connected the heart of their business with their customers, reframing what the organisation should and must be focused on based on what their growers really needed.
Building Understanding to Shape Value
One of the sayings we live by is understand today and grow tomorrow, so every challenge we overcome starts with creating the clearest picture possible of the customers we’re designing for.
At the same time, we work with our partners, not on them, which is why we led this project with a key stakeholder workshop and individual stakeholder interviews to help us define the challenge and understand the current grower experience from their perspective.
The next step was to connect with growers, utilising field trips, call jacking and interviews to connect with real people and gain deeper insights on their interactions with our Client.
Arming Our Agriculture Client With Insight and Empathy
Customer research is at the heart of what we do, but even we find reams and reams of printed data hard to digest. What our Client needed wasn’t just information, it was understanding and empathy.
Breaking down the raw data into an end-to-end customer journey, we were able to articulate uncovered insights into customer behaviour insights, customer needs, and potential opportunity areas for product, service and experience improvements in a way that helped them really understand how their growers tick.
By connecting with their growers on a personal and experiential level, we helped embed empathy into the foundations of their decision making, providing the clarity they needed to work towards solutions that their growers would see as both meaningful and valuable.
Transforming Truth Into Growth
There’s a reason we put customer verbatims at the heart of our design-led solutions. Structured customer understanding amplifies the voice of the customer so that you can hear the truth behind the assumptions.
We listened as growers told us what they valued and how a greater focus on sales and service was critical to removing the pain points highlighted by our customer journey mapping.
Using that understanding, we evolved the proposed design challenge into something that would lead to a solution built on actual customer truths, not expectations, refocussing improving the retailer experience to help deliver a better grower experience through a stepped process.
Your customers’ needs are always changing, your approach should too
Armed with the knowledge of what the growers saw as meaningful change, we worked hand in hand with stakeholders and subject matter experts to create a ground-up customer-centric strategy that refocussed their efforts and turned insight into actionable directives.
We developed a set of Customer Experience Principles that transformed the large amount of rich qualitative data and insights extracted from customer research into the underpinnings of future decision making.
We know having a clear goal in mind is essential when allocating resources and creating internal alignment around that goal, so our principles provided clear delivery guidelines to help internal teams to do the right thing for the right reason.
Aligning around this new customer-centric strategy informed a shift in their organisation design and changed them from just thinking about the customer, to true customer intelligence.
Solutions That Last a Lifetime
We all need something to shoot for in life and visible obtainable goals help build excitement about the process of achieving them. With that in mind, we created a Future State Journey that visualises what customers considered to be their most desirable customer experience when interacting with the organisation.
This perfect journey served to highlight exactly what the customer’s needs are and will serve to guide them into the future with design solutions that are always moving in sync with fluctuating customer needs.
Adaptable, Scalable, and Aspirational Change
When it comes to significant and complex changes, even the most motivated companies are riddled with blockers like limited resources, high stakes, and complex internal dynamics.
The best design-led solution in the world is going to fall flat if it’s not both workable and scalable. We know, we design world-class solutions every day.
Implementing a full-spectrum change of thinking started with a prioritised set of solutions that can be implemented quickly and efficiently to improve the customers’ experience.
From there, we worked with our Agriculture Client to create a transparent Customer Vision and Strategy going forward, supported by scalable initiatives that would rapidly deliver on customer goals.
You can’t tell how well you’ve done if you don’t know where you started, so we incepted a set of relevant metrics to track improvements, developing new KPI’s to deliver on the revised retail strategy that would make our Agriculture Client their grower’s first choice for premium crop-protection products every single time.
Delivering phenomenal outcomes
“Working with Proto was a leap of faith, but they have become a major strategic partner in our CX evolution. The work they've developed and the way we've been able to embed it in the organisation has been absolutely phenomenal, and we're getting the outcomes we want.”
Felicity ClarkCustomer Experience ManagerEvery week 5k+ business leaders get three pragmatic and actionable tips to help understand their customers and employees to accelerate business growth.
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