Less than 90 days to build a new Sales and Customer Value Proposition

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.

Proto team developing customer initiative on computer Agriculture Client at co-creation workshop

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.

Agriculture Client Initiatives expanded stack mock up

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.

Agriculture Client Ideal Journey Map Mock up

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.

Understand your Customers and Grow your business.

Let us help you identify the most important thing about your customers that will unlock your company’s growth.

TALK WITH A CX EXPERT

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.

Proto conducting a co-creation workshop with our Agriculture Client Mapping the future direction booklet mock up
Initiatives and Opportunity areas on computer screen

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.

Agriculture Client customer experience principles

Understand your Customers and Grow your business.

Let us help you identify the most important thing about your customers that will unlock your company’s growth.

TALK WITH A CX EXPERT

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 Clark
Felicity Clark Customer Experience Manager

Creating empathy to deliver outstanding results


“Proto were a pleasure to work with. They were adaptive and responsive, and developed a deep empathy for both the client and their customers. The quality of their products and services was outstanding.”

Michael Storey
Michael Storey Manager of Customer Research and Strategy at Sydney Water

Halving your customer churn


“Without the customer experience insights from the research program, we would not have been able to identify the acquisition issues that we had. Changes to the customer interactions that led up to financial protection have reduced the outflow rates by 50%.”

Felicity Rowcliff Dean
Felicity Rowcliff Dean Customer Centred Design Manager

Take your NPS score to the next level


“From an NPS perspective, I have gone Spinal Tap on you guys and gone to 11. I still think the work you did with us, the way you went about it and the deliverables amounted to one of the best pieces of consulting advice I've ever commissioned.”

Matthew Liebmann
Matthew Liebmann Former Chief Operating Officer

Enabling customer-centric design


“Over the last 18 months, we've constantly referred to the work Proto did for us when designing and developing all the improvements to the app we're making. We've found their work to be highly valuable and has resulted in significant improvements to the MyOptus App that, without their insight wouldn't have been possible.”

Lucy Turner
Lucy Turner CX Design Launch Manager

Exceptional prototyping


“The outcome of the prototyping has been exceptional and we continue to use the knowledge and expertise that Proto shared with us during their engagement. The icing on the cake for me was that Proto captured all of the insights from the customer workshops into an organisational asset that we now use as an integral part of our toolkit for training and briefing new team members.”

Sharon Nanetti
Sharon Nanetti Optimal Care Program Director

Prioritising what matters


“Proto's in-depth customer research helped us to uncover underlying customer needs that wouldn't have been possible without an 'outside-in' approach. The team identified the core customer problems and provided actionable insights that enabled us to remove key areas of customer friction and frustration and redesign a credit card experience like no other.”

Christian Johansson
Christian Johansson Head of Marketing, Customer Finance

Achieving a 20 point increase in NPS


“I have worked with Damian and the team at Proto for several years. In this time, they have worked collaboratively with us to build a roadmap of strategic 'outside-in' initiatives that ultimately resulted in a 20 point increase in NPS. They imparted a great deal of CX knowledge, approaches and tools that have been invaluable to the team and the business.”

Amanda O'Donnell
Amanda O'Donnell Head of Customer Experience

Insight driven, customer centric ideas


“Proto revealed and captured a ton of insights, putting Gumtree in a position where we can take our experience from good to great!”

Coen Horrevoets
Coen Horrevoets Head of Product

Award-winning customer experiences


“We won the AFR Smart Investor SMILES award for Best Online Broker. This award is based on customer voting and I believe this was as a result of a clearer focus on our existing clients which you helped us to understand.”

Arni Selvarajah
Arnie Selvarajah Chief Executive Officer

Design that reduces cost to serve


“The Proto team demonstrated flexibility in their approach which made such a refreshing change. They took the time to coach and mentor each of us in a highly creative and energetic environment. Furthernore, they helped us exceed our customer satisfaction targets, all whilst stripping out in excess of 20% of our service costs in under 12 months. Proto helped us to stay focussed on the customer which enabled us to win in the market.”

Matthew Anderson
Matthew Anderson Chief Operating Officer

Service innovation at scale


“We worked with Proto on an exciting & unprecedented challenge at Optus, to design the customer experience of the future. Damian & the team had high energy & together we operated as 'one team'. Proto worked hand in hand with us to bring the internal team up to speed, & also brought in global experts to work with us to take our deliverables to another level of quality & innovation.”

Dan Sunderland
Dan Sunderland Director of Customer Experience Strategy and Planning

Actionable Customer Strategies


“Proto developed a membership strategy that addressed points of friction along our members journey, identified opportunities to improve and clarified the types of engagement that our members needed at the different stages in their career. We were impressed with the depth of insight that Proto were able to bring to the project - as well as the energy and ideas that they helped to generate.”

Sarah Thompson
Sarah Prescott-Thompson General Manager Shared Services

A partnership for CX


“Working with Proto was very much a partnership. We worked hand-in-hand to put CX on the map within the organisation. The team are flexible, trustworthy and do what it takes to achieve the best outcome. If you’re looking for a quality agency, providing quality data and insights – Proto are your guys. We received over 90 initiatives from the project of which 79% have now been implemented and we are seeing the benefits flow through!”

Customer Experience Specialist

Unique Product Innovation


“Proto integrated into multiple simultaneous projects to ensure we achieved the best outcome. They brought real clarity around customer needs, the fundamental elements of our value proposition and provided a clear roadmap of where we're trying to get to. This allowed us to differentiate beyond the traditional proposition. As a result, one customer-informed initiative we developed was loanScore™. This unique innovation helps customers see how good their home loan is and evaluate their options for a better deal.”

Anthony Justice
Anthony Jusitce CEO