Uniting the voice of customers and employees

Our first step was to go out and talk with customers in a way that would reveal the most important issues. We spent time with Australian Ethical investors to truly understand not only what they wanted from their fund performance, plus what they expected from their ethical investments. By getting up close with everyday ethical investors, we were able to quickly bring back the voice of the customer.

Our next step was to involve Australian Ethical staff. We ran a half day session with more than 50 head office staff to share what we'd found, and co-design solutions. The aim was to accelerate innovation and idea development. We created five idea pods with unique themes and helped everyone generate ideas using Post-it notes and giant innovation boards. The result was an increase in staff engagement and lots more ideas than we ever could have imagined if we didn't involve the whole team.

We also reached out to customers who were invested with Australian Ethical. Of everyone we spoke to, it became crystal clear that customers didn't know about the ethical successes that Australian Ethical were creating with the funds. We realised that if Australian Ethical could do a better job of sharing their successes, not only would customers be happier, it would act as a promotional tool for potential customers.

It's one thing to develop a whole range of ideas that might solve a problem. It's altogether another thing to prioritise those ideas for real life success. We used a Customer Experience Pyramid to sort through what ideas were the 'must haves' for Australian Ethical's members, and which needed to come later.

Our customer journey maps build organisation-wide knowledge of customer actions, thoughts and feelings. We created a current journey map based on customers' existing reality, and then with employees we co-created an ideal journey map that showed what an ideal experience would look and feel like for their members. This ideal map aligned employees and provided guidance on exactly how to prioritise, action and execute distinctive experiences that would help Australian Ethical employees empathise with and delight their customers.

The results were overwhelmingly positive. We were able to deliver against Australian Ethical's 3 year roadmap and create 'wow' customer experiences for over 35,000 Australians that now invest and trust their super with Australian Ethical. By combining detailed customer research, co-design workshops and prioritising 100 initiatives, Australian Ethical employees are aware, aligned and prepared to consistently deliver experiences their customer value and solve any new problems.