At the Front Door
A review of Auckland Council’s strategy for customer interactions through Customer Services.
As channels were managed in silos, it became evident there was a need to coordinate innovations at those channels to help customers, and that channel design needed to adapt to the customer who moved readily across channels to find the help they wanted.
We talked with customers at customer service centres, collected customer stories from customer service staff, reviewed the latest international channel trends research, and used findings to devise a survey that went to 3300 Aucklanders. Together with relevant experts we then synthesised 119 discrete insights into customer types and behavioural factors, customer experience outcome areas, and technology opportunities, before developing future channel concepts and aspirational customer experiences together with channel managers.
A strong theme that emerged was the need to plan for the enablement of diverse types of personal digital messaging into single gateways for rapid sorting and efficient response, preferably with the aid of automated natural language processing.
Project components:
Project for: Auckland Council.
2014
As channels were managed in silos, it became evident there was a need to coordinate innovations at those channels to help customers, and that channel design needed to adapt to the customer who moved readily across channels to find the help they wanted.
We talked with customers at customer service centres, collected customer stories from customer service staff, reviewed the latest international channel trends research, and used findings to devise a survey that went to 3300 Aucklanders. Together with relevant experts we then synthesised 119 discrete insights into customer types and behavioural factors, customer experience outcome areas, and technology opportunities, before developing future channel concepts and aspirational customer experiences together with channel managers.
A strong theme that emerged was the need to plan for the enablement of diverse types of personal digital messaging into single gateways for rapid sorting and efficient response, preferably with the aid of automated natural language processing.
Project components:
- Literature review: channel and customer experience trends (global)
- In-context User Research: 21 intercepts at customer service centres
- Online Survey: to test and refine qualitative insights: 3300 complete responses
- User Types: 17 personas (whole of population), 7 key attributes, 4 thematic types/groups
- Opportunity Areas: 3 customer experience outcome areas, 4 specialist channel purposes, 5 technology opportunity areas
- Future Scenarios: future customer experience scenarios in journey form
- Roadmap: workshopped view of what it might take to implement future scenarios.
Project for: Auckland Council.
2014