This project originated from the IAG Design Centre where our Experience Design Director had been engaged by the Executive Manager of Customer Enablement to refine their Customer Connections program. The Customer Connections program was a 3.5 hour face to face training program where back office leaders could participate in a program to understand who IAG's customers are in order to empathise with both customers and frontline staff.
The objective of this program was to help drive customer centric decision making at senior leadership levels. The challenge was that Customer Connections was a resource intensive program with only one facilitator and was dependant on frontline staff being available for participants to jack into their calls and hope for a non transactional customer enquiry to dial through. The program was a hit and a miss and was not scalable for all back office IAG decision makers.
How might we drive more customer centric decision making across IAG?
To kick off the project, the team and I ran a kickoff session so that our team and the Customer Enablement team could align on ways of working, objectives, and assign work and deadlines. The first phase of work was to conducted Discovery on the problem to understand the specifics on what we are trying to solve, who should be involved, and determine the current effectiveness of the Customer Connections program with regards to meeting its objectives.
The first sprint was to understand how the initial Customer Connections program was conducted, so my team and I immersed ourselves as participants to experience the program, with an unbiased and opened mind. We then moved into understanding all the material and steps the Customer Enablement team took to pull the program together.
After understanding the specifics of our problem space and how the Customer Connections program was aiming to solve this, we started to measure its effectiveness. We had a clear view of the gaps of the Customer Connections program and decided to explore the program's initial objective of driving customer centric decision making across IAG. We landed on key objectives we wanted to learn, and a list of diverse IAG staff members we could speak to. The list was a range of senior leaders who had a direct impact on customer experience right through to staff members who had an indirect impact of customer experience.
We then developed an unbiased interview guide to learn more about decision making and where people ranked their roles and impact on the customer experience / journey. To make the next phase smoother, we created learnings immediately after each interview while the information was fresh in our minds rather than at the end of this stage.
Moving into Synthesis, we took all our learnings from our interviews and created insights. This was an intensive process as we had conducted lots of interviews and had loads of learnings. As the Customer Enablement team were involved with the process, we were coaching them on the thinking and steps involved in the Double Diamond process at the same time as conducting the work.
We also decided to run our synthesis workshops as an activity. We booked out a room for the week and had cut out our learnings into cards and created a fun clustering activity. By the end of an intense week of synthesising, we had great insights which we could start ideating on and getting into solution mode.
A key insight was that the most empathetic leaders who truly have the customer front of mind when making all decisions at IAG were those who have at some point in their career spoken to an IAG customer in distress and helped them through their situation as this led them to a self realisation of the positive impact they could have on customers - almost a sense of internal empowerment and purpose.
After we had developed insights on our problem, we ran a brainstorming workshop where we came up with loads of ideas to solve our problem. Based on our budget and resource constraints, we landed on digitising the Customer Connections program with key emotion inducing calls hand selected to drive empathy.
We developed a few low-fi prototypes and tested it with a random sample of IAG staff which helped us refine the solution. We then moved into hi-fi prototype testing and continued the test, learn, iterate loop until we were ready to pilot our solution.
The Customer Connections program was successfully refined to become an online module in which any number of staff across IAG could register and learn about IAG customers, their struggles and the level of impact an IAG frontline staff member could have on their experience. The feedback from participants had been outstanding, most of which stated how emotionally provocative the content was and how it motivated them to help our customers.
"Really enjoyed with you and your team on Make It Stick, Saj! We would have struggled with Synthesis if you and Erich didn't help guide us through it. You and your team's knowledge and experience in service design is extremely valuable."
- Matt P Executive Manager Customer Futures, IAG