42% of customers perceived process as Easier/much easier 1 single view of customer within the CRM 36% decrease in application/sign up time

The Challenge

When it comes to putting a new product on the market, communication is critical.

As excellent and innovative as your product or service might be, it won’t have the impact you want if you customers are confused by it. When it comes to the journey, if your customer gets lost, then you’ve lost your customer.

Our Client from the Financial Sector came to us with an incredible financial product that just wasn’t resonating with their customers in the way it should have.

They needed to drill down into exactly how their customer felt about their new offering and erase the disconnect between their product’s benefits and their customers understanding.

Since we specialise in removing the barriers between the present and the possible, we set to work aligning our Client around the fundamental purpose of their product and using our in-depth customer-focused research to unpack where it was falling down.

Photo of colourful city streets Man tapping his phone on a card reader

We create the transparency you need to see eye to eye with your customer

To truly understand why the new product wasn’t the hit with their customer it should have been, we needed to amplify the voice of the customer and really listen to their problems.

Breaking down the barriers between the customer’s current perception of a product and it’s actual values required a deeper understanding of those problems and in-depth customer focussed research is the key to that particular lock.

Our first step was to connect with ten key stakeholders. We work with you, not on you, so taking on their expertise and understanding the current experience from their perspective allowed us to shape our research further.

From there, we conducted a review of social media communication to take on current customer feedback and reviewed over 2000 customer respondents from Net Promoter Research (NPS).

Working hand in hand, we walked through the online and in-store customer experience for ourselves before listening in to 50 customer service calls from New Zealand and Manila to determine significant pain points and opportunities.

Customer experience principles mockup on booklet

Customers always appreciate simple and we make the simple, meaningful

By listening to the voice of the customer, we were able to bridge the gap between how our Client perceived their product, and how their customers did.

We show you what existing data can’t and what our research showed was that six primary challenges areas were preventing our Client’s innovative financial products from having the expected resonance with their customers.

Implicit to many of these challenges areas were confusion and a lack of understanding about the process and features of the product. Overcoming these challenges required understanding the customer current reality, with all its barriers and pain points, and then designing a solution that systematically eliminated them.

While many fintech products are complicated, the customer always appreciates simple, and our job is to make the simplest solution the most meaningful.

Storyboard card stack Storyboard illustration

When everyone’s on the same page, you can take your growth to the
next stage

To build customer empathy into the new service design and align all teams around one message, it was essential to track the customer’s journey, building-in organisation-wide knowledge of customer actions, thoughts and feelings.

By stepping into the shoes of the customer, our Client was empowered to remove the challenge areas we had highlighted and brought home the actual benefits of the product on offer in an easily digestible manner.

We empower your staff with the empathy that drives buy-in.

To remove the barriers between our Client’s people and their customers we incepted a series of Customer Experience Principles that turned the enormous amounts of rich qualitative data and insights extracted from customer research into an actionable roadmap for future success.

Current Customer Journey Map

We work your way, with an
equal focus on customer
and business outcomes

We equip companies with the insights they need to grow and the upshot of our partnership with our Client was a 36% decrease in application/signup times and a 42% increase in the number of customers who perceived the new process as “Easier/Much Easier”.

While these advances in customer satisfaction were incredible, we here at Proto believe that flexibility and continued innovation is the key to maintaining the confidence to navigate challenging business environments.

To that end, we put in place Initiative Boards that provided guidance and shared focus to employees at every level, empowering them to communicate quickly and clearly how to move from current to ideal experience by delivering interactions that customers remember as valuable.

There’s always a solution out there, and we’ll find it with you.

Visualised solutions card stack

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