SELECTED CASE STUDIES

This was one of my first roles in my career, and it was a corporate sales role - absolutely nothing to do with "design". After 6 months though, I was not doing very well and was in the bottom half of the sales table.

I committed to a goal of at least moving to the top half of the sales table, and sought out the advice and mentorship of Dennis Pope, then Executive Manager for Merchant Facilities and also apparently the first person to install a NAB EFTPOS facility in Victoria (I hope I remembered this detail correctly).

There was no formal courses or techniques taught by Dennis, but the lesson was pretty simple, direct and consistent.

He pointed out that we had a few EFTPOS terminal and internet payment gateway options. While it's important to know the differences and rates for each potential customer, it's actually more important to know the customer, their needs and what will make a difference to them. He then proceeded to of course teach me how to engage customers and analyse their feedback.

This was an important lesson I took to heart, and one that has stayed with me my entire career. 

As a result, I spent a lot more time getting to know customers over the phone and in-person.

The usual engagement process was to respond with rates and some information on the payment terminals, and then follow up. The information I gathered from researching customers sparked an innovative experience change. There was a lot of customer feedback, but the main one that came through was customers were time poor (mainly due to wanting to get up and running quickly and having a million other things to do) and just wanted a good rate - and it did not need to be the absolute lowest rate if the process was fast and convenient.

As a result, instead of just sending out the terminal rates and some basic information, I made the effort to generate contracts (which was a lot more than just generating information brochures) and send it out to customers after their initial enquiry.

Customers appreciated the decent rates, and how quickly they could start the process because the contract was there ready to sign if they decided to proceed. This also resulted in my move to the top of the sales board for merchant facilities in Australia. More importantly, it sparked an everlasting passion in all things Customer Experience and Service Design.

In a desire to get involved in the customer's "pre-REA" journey, REA made a decision to explore creating a hybrid product with Realtair. Realtair is an external company that makes it easier for real estate agents to engage with home owners by smartly gathering necessary data in an easy portal. 

The challenge and goal here was to start designing how this might work (e.g. how would Realtair's web software integrate with REA's platform, how would we deal with consent and identity issues) and how it would be supported by both company's customer support functions (as the initial discussions indicated customers would interact with 2 different platforms!).

By this time, I had many more years of experience and with more formal tools and frameworks. 

For the initial discovery and high level design, Customer Journey Mapping was used to align strategic stakeholders (from both companies) on key issues and focus areas.

Once the group had gone through several iterations and agreed on the broad direction, I began construction of a Service Blueprint (in Miro) to inform and coordinate the various areas (Product, Consent, UI, Support etc.). I then aligned Trello cards (which was further connected to Jira cards) with the Service Blueprint to coordinate and refine actual implementation.

Due to my experience in managing customer support, I was also asked to further refine the design and implement the support experience and processes between REA and Realtair.

The result was a success, where the Realtair product was combined successfully with an existing REA digital product (using REA's consent and identity credentials). 

The product was called "Pitch" (see the video above by REA for a brief explanation of the product). This hybrid product was in fact so successful that REA eventually acquired Realtair in mid 2024.

Although the Wesfarmers retail brands are strong, they recognised the threat from competitors like Amazon, Temu etc. 

Wesfarmers OneDigital created the OnePass shopping subscription in an attempt to combat this. While OnePass is now a strong brand, the competitive threat is strong as evidenced by the shut down of Catch in early 2025 (while Amazon, Temu etc. continue to grow).  The program initially launched with free delivery with some of the Wesfarmers retail brands (and the rest joining later). 

We recognised the program needed more and sought out what else the program could deliver to customers. 

The initial discovery (ahem, Double Diamond anyone?) was done through an external agency, which determined several broad areas that may fit with the OnePass value proposition. 

The area I was tasked with focusing on was how to give purchase confidence to different types of shoppers (e.g. personal, for non-family, for family) across thousands of different product types.

We latched on to the Change of Mind policies, which were mostly a standard 30 days. We conducted primary research with several hundred customers and also cross-analysed with returns data from several of the retail brands.

The insights revealed that a 365 day Change of Mind policy would give purchase confidence in several scenarios. However, the compelling details on why can't be revealed due to confidentiality restrictions.

As a result, this became one of 3 new value propositions introduced to OnePass in 2023. 

There if of course no such thing as perfection, but this airline tries! One of my responsibilities was managing the CX audit function, which audited every touch point (e.g. inflight, check-in, lounge) through a mixture of reactive feedback (customer giving feedback) and pro-active feedback (my team undertaking pro-active audits) analysis.

The challenge was the existing forum (attended by senior department heads) for diagnosing the feedback and audits, and then discussing the short to medium term improvement plans, was already a very well oiled machine before I joined.

However, I noticed the forum can sometimes be fairly high pressure on department heads due to what seemed like a lack of time to properly digest all the insights in the report. So I set out to find out whether anything could be done to reduce this pressure.

The Double Diamond came into play again, with a heavy dose of process re-engineering.   

The pain point was identified easily enough (i.e. department heads not having enough time to digest report before having to answer for it in the monthly forum). However, the underlying cause of it needed a heavy dose of business analysis and stakeholder engagement to identify if the same quality insights could be constructed using different methodology.

My team and I also needed to change the process of some how data was gathered and analysed, and also tested several methodologies to ensure there was no negative impact on customer outcome and insight quality.

My team and I were able to deliver an equivalent high quality monthly insights report 1.5 weeks faster. This was important as the highly valued monthly meeting relies on that report, and a faster release of the report had wide ranging positive impact. 

It gave more time to the various departments more time to digest the data, which in turn gave more time for my team and those departments to coordinate and update improvement plans.

This was one of the most satisfying changes I've led because although it wasn't the most "sexy" change, it was a positive change to something fundamental that had a company wide impact. This reinforced the notion of "chase the impact, not the glory", a value that I hold dearly.