In 2020 we introduced a new Customer Experience Strategy for the Clyde Valley Group. This strategy aimed to improve our services to provide an outstanding customer experience and to reduce customer effort. We needed to understand our customers, their needs and aspirations and, most importantly, their expectations of outstanding customer experience.

What was done

The project was led by our Customer Service Director. We undertook Service Design training during 2019, giving us an insight into the power and effectiveness of this approach. We discussed our Customer Experience Strategy with some experts in this field, specifically around the objectives that we were seeking to achieve. Through this we were able to devise an approach that allowed us to explore customer experience as a whole service delivery topic, rather than the usual approach to service design that looks at a very specific service or product.

We were very keen to avoid bring any of our own biases to the project so decided to bring in an independent research company to work on this project. We conducted desktop research, customer segmentation, focus groups, depth interviews, a telephone survey, customer journey mapping and servicizing exercises.

What was the output and the outcome?

Our service design project has been transformational in terms of how we view our customers and their expectations of service delivery. The project allowed us to identify 5 key areas of successful customer experience, which we have adopted as our customer promises. The project allowed to effectively design new customer experience offerings in terms of a Customer Contact Centre and CRM system, as well as influencing our approach to gathering transactional feedback and learning from customers.

Key learning points

We gave the project time and resource and this worked well. If we had tried to rush it for an arbitrary deadline, or if we had tried to do it on the cheap, we wouldn’t have achieved the quality of insight that we did.

Our project was deliberately wide in scope, covering the theme of customer experience in general. This meant that it was more difficult to servicize and prototype effectively due to the thematic nature of the project. We did, however, manage to convert the research and learning into real changes in how we deliver services and measure customer experience.

Hints and Tips

Do

• Undertake training into the Service Design approach
• Engage with a research partner to ensure independence
• Take your time – this type of work needs time and space and can’t be rushed
• Ask questions – there are communities of experts and practitioners out there that are happy to discuss your ideas and help you overcome obstacles

Don’t

• Make assumptions about your service users – let them speak for themselves
• Start with a list of service ideas that you ‘think’ will come out of the process – let the research identify these
• Make it a one-off exercise – you can’t rely on research and design work from years ago to define how your services work now. You need to continue to refresh and iterate