Hearing the Voice of the Customer

To build a consistent omni-channel customer experience for Alinta, we first had to understand the needs of their customer base.

Alinta has two separate operating models in the east and west coast of Australia. To gain an in-depth understanding of all Alinta's customers, their journey and their needs, we designed a customer journey map for each coast. This helped to uncover vast differences between the two models and the unique challenges each one faced.

To generate the insights we needed to transform Alinta's customer service program, we reached out to their customers, assessing their needs, understanding their motivations, and walking in their shoes.

We designed and conducted online customer surveys for over 1000 customers and 30 face-to-face interviews to give us the depth of information we needed to produce valuable and actionable insights.

In line with our "outside-in" approach to customer research, we actively worked with Alinta's staff, listening to recorded calls, shadowing call-centre staff, and conducting frontline interviews with customer-facing personnel.

This allowed us to develop empathy for their customers and employees and produce insights that would not have been possible if we had been on the outside looking in.

Leveraging the depth of our research and the connections we were able to build with Alinta's customers, we constructed a specific set of actionable insights for each coast.

These addressed vital issues in the customers' journey such as perceived lack of transparency and clarity in communications on the east coast and lack of a systemised on-boarding process for customers on the west coast due to being the incumbent provider in that market.

The initiatives developed were visualised into compelling storyboards that provided a practical understanding of every touch-point and channel from their customers and employees' perspective. The findings highlighted specific issues caused by the misalignment across key departments, in particular the different call centres and procedures that needed to be better connected.

The clarity Alinta gained from the results created a mindset shift that drove impetus for change. Alinta understood that in order to improve their customers' experience, they would first need to improve their employees' experience and provide staff with the tools to succeed. Phase two of our work with Alinta is helping them re-design their employee experience and create the ideal call-centre experience.