Implementing an Ideal Customer Onboarding Experience

Sydney Metro is Australia's largest public transport project currently under construction and a priority infrastructure investment for the NSW Government. When it becomes operational in 2019, it will be the first fully automated metro rail system in Australia, delivering eight new railway stations and 4,000 commuter car parking spaces to Sydney's growing Northwest population.

As part of their partnership with us, Sydney Metro switched to an "outside in" method of customer research to determine the answers to three fundamental questions, "who" are our customers, "what" are their needs and "how" can their needs be met.

By working with Proto to find the answer to those questions, Sydney Metro would have the tools necessary to design an integrated travel experience simple, stress-free and engaging, making Sydney Metro the customer's first choice of travel for every journey.

To build a comprehensive and reliable picture of Sydney Metro's Northwest customer, we deployed a wide range of research practices, capturing the customers perspective and highlighting relevant satisfaction drivers. By undertaking methods such as customer surveys, interviews, in-depth "jobs-to-be-done" workshops, and even a seven-day online diary delving into customers emotional needs, we quickly uncovered a number of significant customer insights.

Chief among these was the inescapable fact that the journey experience for Sydney Metro customers was part of a broader transport ecosystem that would need to be considered and incorporated as a fundamental part of the delivery of the ideal customer experience.

To provide Sydney Metro with the toolkit needed to build the ideal "door to door to door" experience for their customers, we distilled our research down into a compelling visual flow of the 20-touch-point ideal Metro experience.

We gained the understanding of the typical customer's current journey by analysing similar travel experiences step-by-step, interaction by interaction, touch-point by touch-point. By stepping into travelling customers shoes, we gained a much greater understanding of how customers interacted and perceived what an ideal service would look and feel like.

With an emphasis on "What does easy look like?", we highlighted a total of 40 fresh opportunities to improve the lives of Sydney Metro's customers, providing them with mission-critical insights that would allow them to deliver their customer experience goals.

To help Sydney Metro understand what information its future customers would need for an easy customer experience as part of their door to door journey with Sydney Metro, we sought to validate assumptions made based on information from the Sydney Metro Service Model we had developed.

The objective of the research was to gain a deeper understanding of the self service information requirements of their future customers, uncovering underlying information needs at each stage of their journey. In order to validate the assumptions we undertook research groups with each of the 5 segments identified by Sydney Metro and validated each segment with what information was most important to them at the various stages of the customer journey. The final outcomes resulted in interactive heatmaps by segment.