Putting Customers at the Heart

Improvement doesn’t always have to mean huge capital expenditure. Sometimes it comes down to reassessing your value proposition and utilising the resources you have at hand in new and innovative ways.

Our client who operated within the Transport category, was already proving an excellent and reliable bus service, but they came to us to get the help they needed to expand outside of simple functionality and provide a customer experience so compelling that it would persuade drivers to get out of their cars and onto the bus.

Innovation always requires investment, but that investment doesn’t always mean spending millions of dollars. Sometimes it means investing the time to truly understand what your customers need and investing the effort to empower your staff to deliver it.

In the case of our Client, no amount of additional buses were going to help tempt customers out of their cars. To become the premier public transport provider in their State, they needed to create a customer experience that was so compelling that people would choose it over the convenience of their personal vehicle.

To create that experience, we needed a clearer picture of what drives a superior customer experience and the drivers behind user choice over the transport methods they use.

To build a picture of a customer journey that would provide enough value to tempt people out of their cars, we first needed to understand the current user experience. We reviewed feedback from over 3000 customers to understand existing customer behaviour.

Since Proto works with our customers, not on them, we also interviewed 11 key stakeholders to both understand both the current experience, and the challenges, from their perspective.

Having developed a deeper understanding of their current value proposition and their insight on how they wanted to innovate on it, we turned to customer-led research to provide the data that would drive those innovations.

By reaching out to more than 800 customers across five local areas, we were able to more build more profound insights into their interactions with the service and develop them into a journey map that highlighted both current pain points and opportunities for improvement and innovation.

What our research quickly revealed was that the interactions between customers and staff, alongside the functionality of their service, was the most significant area of potential improvement.

The drivers deliver 10,000 plus customer experiences every day and empowering them to make every single one of those experience exceptional was critical to the creation of a new and attractive value proposition for the company.

Through online employee surveys, driver interviews, and shadowing team members, we added the driver’s experiences to the journey map, comparing and contrasting them to those of their customers.

These two intertwined journey maps organised feedback from both customers and staff into an easily digestible guide to service development that built in customer empathy and staff support and alignment to the core of the decision making process.

With the current journey of both customer and drivers mapped out, we translated our collected truths into two sets of need states. Four for the customer and four for the driver.

These need states illuminated how to move more car drivers into bus customers by placing the customer experience at the centre of their operational decisions. Just as importantly, it highlighted how the company could leverage the power of their workforce through the right support, training, and workshops, to consistently deliver that experience.

Working hand in hand with stakeholders during a co-creation workshop, we isolated the fundamental challenges in creating this ideal customer experience and designed eight key programs of work to address and overcome those challenges.