Implementing an Ideal Customer Onboarding Experience

After performing a deep-dive on the current onboarding process, we discovered that limited engagement in this crucial primary phase of the customer journey had led to a critical gap in the current system, constraining Sydney Water's ability to create direct and rewarding relationships with new customers.

Having revealed the root of the problem, it was crucial that Sydney Water's onboarding experience was re-assessed and a redesigned solution put in place as swiftly as possible.

To facilitate the best result for our customer, Proto created an embedded, rapid-prototyping team. They work closely with Sydney Water's customers, staff, and management to create an updated onboarding system. This would allow Sydney Water to engage their customers in a rewarding and personalised manner.

To lay the groundwork for an onboarding strategy that was uniquely focussed on the customers needs, we moved rapidly into an adaptive testing phase, using customer feedback to identify three primary opportunities to improve the onboarding process that could be implemented immediately.

We prioritised connecting with customers and acknowledging their individual needs and circumstances. This educated the customers on highly relevant information to enable us and engaging customers with meaningful and supportive interactions, we were able to create a framework for an improved onboarding process. Crucially, this updated process could be rolled out on in a short time frame but was still scalable and adaptive.

With a scalable framework in place, we moved quickly to identify seven critical channels of opportunity where changes would result in tangible improvements to the onboarding process. Using rapid prototyping, we were able to develop, test and implement over 30 prototype initiatives across those seven channels, drawing on feedback from external customers, internal staff, and industry leaders.

By identifying these channels, and creating rapid, customer-feedback driven improvements across all of them, we enabled Sydney Water to engage its customers upstream, building trust-based, long-term relationships from the first moment of customer contact.

Introducing new systems and initiatives is an inherently disruptive process. Understanding this, and seeking to quickly implement a redesigned onboarding process while minimising disruption, we focussed on creating scalable design elements coupled with new communication tools that would generate traction across the organisation.

Through the use of storyboards highlighting the current and improved Contact Centre onboarding experience, profile posters of customer service representatives and videos that emphasised the positive experiences of staff from the onboarding experience pilot, we were able to fast-track implementation and scaling of designated components of the onboarding experience. This was complemented by our delivery of lean, customer-focused workflows for the Contact Centre and Accounts teams.

In a tight six-week time frame, we were able to deploy these initiatives that put the customer back at the heart of Sydney Water's onboarding process. Our communication tools and a robust roadmap for scalable implementation reduced disruption and delivered Sydney Water significant annual savings from a reduction in repeat calls from customers.

Our initiatives allowed staff to engage customers on a receptive, human basis, empowering them to respond quickly and effectively to their customers' needs and resulting in a 200% improvement in staff Net Promoter Score (NPS) along with a definable increase in customer NPS.