According to numerous studies, two out of three organisations have to change at least four times every five years.
In other words, if you want to remain competitive or qualified, you need to embrace change sooner or later. Otherwise, your challengers or customers will leave you behind.
When accomplished correctly, organisational change can turn your organisation into a more competitive and effective business.
Many government organisations are still bureaucratic and unprepared for change.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case in the matter of the City of Stonnington.
Why is the customer experience team beneficial?
The City of Stonnington is a local government area located within the metropolitan region of Melbourne. It comprises the inner south-eastern suburbs from the Melbourne CBD between 3 and 13 km. The Council services a population of 116,000 residents in almost 60,000 residential properties, covering an area of 25.7 km2.
The City of Stonnington is a value-driven, hardworking, and progressive organisation. The Council offers exception working conditions and fosters a collaborative and trustful culture.
However, these conditions haven’t necessarily translated to the customers they serve.
Answering the need for change, the Council adopted a new customer experience strategy in March 2020. The idea was to support every division and person at the City of Stonnington to be more customer-focused and deliver exceptional services to its community.
Although, in August 2020, the Director of Customer and Strategy in the City of Stonnington realised that the strategy had not achieved its initial milestone dates.
Capability and deliverables of the CX team
Three key issues were discovered upon an internal review of the existing Customer Experience team’s capability and deliverables.
- The department manager lacked the skilled resources in the team to deliver on the strategy. In addition, while the Council had publicly advertised for multiple Customer Experience team roles, the quality of the talent applying for the positions was not satisfactory.
- There was a lack of consistency in the Customer Experience team’s output when delivering service journey maps. In addition, the existing customer experience team lacked project management or design experience.
Example of the CX journey map
- There was very little understanding of ‘The benefits of CX’ by other stakeholders across the organisation, which caused delays in scheduling. Other managers were hesitant to allocate resources to the discovery project.
The City of Stonnington had already commenced their transformation program. However, they knew that a team of full-time CX professionals would need to be hired and started by the end of 2020 to enable the organisation to bring the CX program back on schedule.
Time for experts
The Council engaged a specialised Customer Experience recruitment agency Frazer Tremble Executive to implement this decision.
The City of Stonnington chooses Frazer Tremble Executive because it offers a unique hybrid model. Firstly, Frazer Tremble provides a recruitment service (permanent and contracting). Secondly, its sister company CX Loop Consulting is CX Consulting services.
CX Loop completed an independent assessment of Stonnington’s needs based on the project timeline and deliverables and put forward two key recommendations.
- Re-position the Customer Experience team into another division/team for greater involvement in the overall transformation project. Re-position will also help align the objectives of the CX strategy with similar objects on other processes (i.e., technology improvement).
- Due to the limited training and capability of the existing team members, CX Loop recommended that the City of Stonnington add additional (already skilled) resources to the team.
These roles were:
- A CX Lead – to head up the day-to-day management of the Customer Experience team. In addition, the CX Lead would assist the department manager in creating and delivering the strategic aspect of the department.
- 2x Senior Service Designers. These experienced resources would bring higher quality and consistency to the Customer Experience team’s capability and enable them to work with other services across the business.
The City of Stonnington was able to activate both the recommendations put forward by the agency in record time.
As part of the consulting engagement and due to an unanticipated secondment of the previous ‘Manager of Customer Experience and Innovation’ to another role, Brendan Tremble, CX Loop’s Lead consultant and Co-founder, stepped into ‘Acting Manager of Customer Experience and Innovation’. However, it was temporary until The City of Stonnington found a full-time replacement.
Communication is crucial
This interim appointment meant that Brendan would work directly with the Director of Customer and Technology and be fully accountable for all interactions and facilitation by the CX Loop consulting team and the internal Customer Experience team.
Previously, the City of Stonnington Customer Experience team had been sitting as an independent team. Within the directorate of Customer and Technology.
However, based on CX Loop recommendations, the Customer Experience team was merged with the existing Transformation team and reported to the Program Director Digital Transformation.
In the initial stages of the project, CX Loop discovered that the Customer Experience team was operating in a methodology agnostic style. This way confused stakeholders on how and when the project would be commenced, conducted, and concluded.
In consultation with the Director of the Department, Greg Curcio, the CX Loop team introduced a new style of working (based on Agile principles) for the Customer Experience team that all stakeholders could easily communicate and understand.
This style of working also included standard project management tools and templates. In addition, it allowed the Customer Experience team to work collaboratively with the Digital team and Change Managers to impact multiple services.
CX program back on schedule
CX Loop Consulting and Frazer Tremble Executive delivered outstanding results on all aspects of this engagement. While there are too many achievements to list on this document, here are some of the favourites:
- The original scope of engagement requested comprehensive journey maps of four Services. Following initial conversations with service stakeholders, it was identified that a customer journey map would not be able to represent the root cause of primary issues. CX Loop instead completed detailed Service blueprints (at no extra cost), which could show the internal processes behind the customer journey.
City of Stonnington – Service Blueprint Example
- Through an intensive head-hunting campaign, Frazer Tremble Executive successfully sourced 1x Program Lead and 2 x, Senior Service Designers in under three weeks. As a result, the new additions to the team could start three weeks ahead of schedule.
- Midway through the engagement, CX Loop was requested to manage a “Proof of Concept (POC)” project. The POC as to evaluate the introduction of a Business Process software. CX Loop was able to complete this request with no additional time or budget added to the project.
Exceptional services for the community
As a result of the new structure and the additional experience to the team, the City of Stonnington was able to progress on achieving its strategic milestones. They also were able to improve the processes across the business.
CX Loop and Frazer Tremble Executive were delivered on time and under budget.
“City of Stonnington engaged with CX Loop to bootstrap our Customer Experience team and program. Over eight weeks, Brendan led the initiative, attracted, and recruited top talent, developed the Customer Experience roadmap. He also delivered five high-impact customer journeys. As a result, CoS (City of Stonnington) is now in a strong position. We are in a situation to deliver a modern customer experience for our community”, said Greg Curcio, Director, Customer and Technology, the City of Stonnington.
Phone: 0449 069 065
**NOTE: This is a CX Loop and Frazer Tremble Executive Case Study. The content was created based on a project conducted by CX Loop and Frazer Tremble Executive in late 2020**
