Case study: Otago Regional Council

Challenge

The Otago Regional Council has responsibility for the second largest area by land mass in New Zealand and as such serves a diverse population. ORC’s customers are members of the general public, businesses, other local government bodies and anyone else who relies on ORC as a key regional service provider.

The Otago Regional Council is committed to delivering great customer service and, with this in mind, had identified that some of their older systems and processes for serving their diverse customer base needed to be reviewed. The idea of having a much more consolidated view of their customers and their interactions was also appealing to ORC, so that they could deliver better outcomes to the people that used their services.

Some discussion had taken place on the topic of leveraging a technology solution to help achieve this consolidated customer view, but ORC realised that before they went down this path that they needed to review and potentially revise their customer experience strategy.

Otago Regional Council engaged PivotPoint to provide strategic advice on improving the Council’s customer service function.

What we did

Working closely with the ORC, PivotPoint devised and delivered a project plan which included the following key phases:

• Information Gathering
  Interviewing internal stakeholders and synthesising information on teams, systems, information architecture, tools, and processes.
• Observation
  ‍Sitting with customer service representatives (CSRs), asking questions about their processes, their tools, issues they face, and opportunities.
• Interaction Analysis
  ‍Capturing metrics of Customer Service Representative (CSR) interactions during service delivery (2,500+ captured).
• Website Analysis
  Review of website content, performance, analytics, flow analysis, mobile device responsiveness and functionality.
• Customer Journey Mapping
  ‍Multiple workshops with internal stakeholders to define some of ORC’s current core customer experiences, based on real scenarios.
• Qualitative Interviews
  Research interviews with a mix of ORC’s customers to better define their needs, behaviours, goals and aspirations for ORC related services.
• Analysis
  Review and synthesis of data to identify common patterns and themes.
• Strategy Creation
  ‍Using observed themes as a backbone to define a strategic approach for the Customer Service Strategy, including roadmap prioritisation
• Presentation Design
  Visual design of project information, findings, data and objectives into a cohesive document presentation that could be consumed by ORC.

Outcomes

Through this project, PivotPoint helped ORC identify a range of findings and insights that led to the creation of several key strategic tenets, with the aim of improving customer service experiences and establishing a clear roadmap ahead for ORC

As an example, the purpose of some of these strategic tenets was to:

• Establish a customer experience framework for ORC to align its teams to, given that it was identified that the customer experience function spanned multiple teams;
• Communicate ORCs identity, responsibilities and values clearly, as people were not always clear on when they should contact ORC, or another council;
• Align communication channels in a way that supported the customer service function, as not all channels were necessarily as customer-centric as they could have been;
• Highlight the importance of looking at both the technological systems and human systems that work together to deliver great customer experiences, as focusing on either in isolation creates experience gaps; and
• Inspire a culture of continuous learning and curiosity, encouraging regular enquiry and conversations with customers, as fresh insights will inform the ongoing service roadmap and foster a culture of continual learning and improvement.

Having performed this research and analysis, and establishing strategic objectives, it is clear that the solution to improving customer service experiences was not limited to introducing a new technology system, as this may have just added another layer of complexity over the top of existing systems and processes.
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Any new technology system or process can now be considered alongside these strategic objectives and ORC has a strong foundation to build on, so that it can deliver outstanding customer experiences moving forward.