The CX Showcase is an inspiring platform where the movers and shakers of the Customer Experience and Service Industry explore how Australian Service Excellence Awards winners break conventional wisdom to better their services and Australian lives. It shares innovation that typically only judges of the CSIA awards see before being lost to the CX community. An event that celebrates and supports meeting like-minded people and companies.
Our role as CX and Service experts largely remains undervalued. Proven in the CX Showcase from our presenters, is that we help the community prosper with financial well-being, better health, career & personal growth, making our roads safer and even saving lives. I hope this article provides you with an insight or two to help make a meaningful difference too.
Our job is challenging, with Monash University reporting 9/10 employees experiencing digital exhaustion, that the complexity of service and technology is ever expanding and new findings from Gartner highlighting that satisfying customers is not enough we have to create value for them to purchase more or be an advocate for us.
Congratulations to our incredible CSIA ASEA award winners and the sponsors. They have been able to simplify the complexities and challenges to deliver a sustainable meaningful difference by breaking conventional wisdom and innovating.
HCF – Presented by Eric Peterson, Head of Member Experience, Retention & Loyalty.
“Systematic Approach to Delivering Rapid Member and Health Benefits”
Eric Peterson shared HCF’s ambition to provide more health benefits to their 1.5 million members so both HCF and their customers gain higher lifetime value. HCF has innovatively pulled together a systematic approach to deliver sustainable benefit improvements:
- Target & Transparency: Moved away from net promoter goal to satisfaction and making this transparent, as it was more meaningful to deliver member benefits.
- Get Started: You don’t need exec approval to start, you can start by empowering teams to make tactical/operational changes. Tactical operational improvements help to build a culture of improvement and change, while proving value to the executives for support to extend a Voice of the Customer program (VoC).
- Simplify: HCF has been able to simplify its vision, goals, channels, and customer journeys down to 9 process and change methods (listen, learn & act). This clarity or systematic approach allows teams to operate effectively.
- Systematic Action: Awareness alone does not work, effectively breaking innovation into groups actions and methods:
- Deep dives to find specific team or channel trends to define a problem so that the business teams could deliver a tactical solution and action rapidly.
- MX community where templates and tools can explore a problem, in the span of their control, and use human centred design thinking to resolve them.
- MX Rapid Design Challenges. Find specific pain points, recommend design changes and build targeted solutions by specialist role.
- Target state experience, big picture future state with 9 customer journeys by VoC program team.
- Cost: By refocusing existing resources and optimising communication with the teams, the VoC program stayed low cost and avoided adding stakeholders and complexity, dramatically accelerating their VoC program.
As a result, 1.5M members are realising their health benefits sooner seeing a 9+ point increase in customer satisfaction at the early stages of the program.
Australia Red Cross Lifeblood – Presented by Ian Pybourne, National Contact Centre Manager.
“How Moving from QA to a Service Promise Saves Lives”
Ian Pybourne and his team have an impact on blood donations in Australia. Every donation has the power to save 3 lives and the fact that Australia needs 35,000 donations a week makes donors priceless since they ensure the safety of thousands of Australians.
Quality Assurance is about compliance, scores & coaching but does not focus on the customer outcomes or the people in the centre. Ian and his team designed a new way, a service promise called “H.E.A.R.T” focusing on value. The solution included:
- Customer Value: defining what value was to a contact journey. Understanding what they wanted customers to feel during the hello, engagement, detail, time and thank you.
- How: Clear breakdown of what the consultant would do, and what the customer would experience. This clarity enabled consultants in the first seconds of contact to create HEART-felt moments resulting in consultants hearing a HEART-felt thank you and customers being inspired.
Value through a Service Promise over Quality Assurance is totally against the conventional wisdom of how to deliver services. There was resistance at first, overcome by proving the value with a pilot of three staff and implementing three measures for donor feedback, appointment feedback and donor reliability.
The results speak for themselves, 51,000 additional appointments, impacting 150,000 lives across Australia. 126% increase in positive donor sentiment. 94% of the team achieved donor KPI targets, 31% increase in the staff engagement survey.
Jaybro – Presented by Silver Battikha, Customer Experience Manager.
“Programmatic Approach that helps new businesses, engage employees who deliver great service to provide Safe and Effective Construction Industry solutions”
Silver Battikha shared her journey in the most challenging of environments, new acquisitions. How she and Jaybro use an operating model and culture that delivers better ways of working, change excitement, employee engagement and career growth that ultimately provides better customer services, dramatic growth of Jaybro and contributes to a safer construction industry.
- Operating Model: Jaybro have a clear and complete operating model so when a new person or business starts in Jaybro they know what is expected and can immediately adopt the standard proven approach.
- Transparency, Targets & Bottom up: co-design of targets, plans and open communication without red tape. Allows individuals to be entrepreneurs so the team can take initiative flexibly. Targets are clear, reported on consistently and communicated broadly.
- 1 on1’s & Celebration: weekly support on the staff members plans to show care plus develop people and celebrate the wins along the way. Avoids focusing on the negatives.
- Cadence: a system that is regular and consistent is motivating and makes work more enjoyable.
Operating models with flexibility and a bottom-up approach break the conventional wisdom that leaders of the business drive performance through KPIs and coaching. This approach has resulted in Jaybro improving employee engagement by over 10%, being awarded “A Great Place to Work” 3x years in a row and delighted customers scoring a leader-level NPS of 72 points. This ultimately provides expanded service that contributes to a safer and more effective construction industry.
BT Financial – Presented by Daniel Crombie, Head of BT Platforms Contact Centre.
“How Performance and Service Tracking Transparency is Improving Financial Wellbeing of Clients.”
Damien Crombie shared how BT has combined data-driven analysis of the customer’s voice, technology, and change adoption methods and dared to make visible performance and tracking of services to transform service performance. It is not unusual for centres to have the challenge of high volumes of customers calling for status updates, as BT had. Here are the key elements I picked up from the solution:
- Brand & Culture: Linking BT’s people and their commitment to enabling the financial industry to thrive to “Empower more people to achieve their financial goals”. This aligns and motivates people toward a common goal and culture, helping to accelerate relevant activity.
- Voice of the Customer: Decisions are underpinned by customer and quality data with forensic analysis to select the right effort and a roadmap of initiatives.
- Tracker (BT Panorama): A pizza tracker style technology allows clients to get visibility of the progress of their service request along with performance and timing expectations.
- Customer Enablement: Knowing the adoption of the technology is essential for success BT provided strong customer communications and guided customers to use the tracker on their calls. Customers now have the information at their fingertips to track their requests reducing call volume of this type by 48%, dropping it from number 1 to outside the top call volume types.
Damien shared a secret of the best advice he was given, that is the most successful people in teams do more learning or listening. Conventional wisdom would say to take your knowledge and apply it, by taking the advice of listening to customer data and using science to solve the highest call volumes using a digital platform that customers love. This platform is now ready to reduce unnecessary work by 30-40% so call centre consultants can spend more time adding value and supporting over 350,000 clients and advisors to empower Australians to realise their financial goals and financial well-being.
National Heavy Vehicle Regulator – Presented by Mr Sal Petroccitto OAM, Chief Executive Officer.
“Unique approach to compliance – using customer experience and service over a rules and stick method to make Australian roads safer.”
Sal Petroccitto explained how compliance levels were not improving significantly and “If I do my job right you all get home safely” so he was looking for a better way.
Truly courageous as the first regulation organisation I know of that has moved away from the traditional model of guilty until proven innocent to innocent requiring enablement. Offering great service to ensure organisations and drivers can and are motivated to comply with heavy vehicle road safety. An approach seeking to drive up compliance and has early signs of improving safety on the road encompassing 1000 staff, 200,000 people involved in the industry, all levels of government and 850,000+ km roads.
Highlighting the importance of the work and why his mission is valuable. My insights from Sal’s presentation were:
- Leadership, People & Culture Alignment: Bringing together 6 different cultures to the customer focused culture of inform, educate, and enforce. Applying value driven culture with a people matter focus by treating customers as you would like to be treated and respected. To enable this approach some executives had to move on as their mindset felt we are a regulator, so we have to tell them what to do. A commitment was achieved at board, leadership and individual levels.
- Customer Engagement: The trucking industry was sceptical. Leaders went out in the field with officers and met customers. Officers are enabled and ready to educate and apply knowledge first then enforce for repeat or serious offences. This has been liberating for the officers who enjoy work and can make a difference. Now instead of handing out a ticket, the officers are getting a handshake.
- Consistency & Build Trust: Having a consistent message in the contact centre or any officer in any geographic location in Australia is important. Senior leaders make a promise and deliver on it. Standard journey maps have been created and are on staff walls to support the approach. Office and Contact Centre mindset and training helped too.
NHVR are different, they talk to people. Conventional wisdom says to get compliance you must tell the person what they are doing wrong and penalise them to create enough pain for them to act. NHVR has turned this on its head listening, enabling, and treating customers to enable and motivate action for sustainable compliance. Already there are early benefits with complements now outnumbering complaints, 90% resolved inquiries first time and satisfaction levels of 4.9/5. There are now green shoots showing improved road safety and isolating poor performing companies for specific enablement and compliance programs that will make our roads even safer.
If you would like to join us for CX Showcase 2025 you can register your interest now.
Highlights and insights shared by Todd Grosuch, CEO, Customer Science Group.
