Roadside assistance provider the NRMA has embarked on a customer experience transformation that aims to improve its digital and product offerings by harnessing customer sentiment and feedback.
General manager for customer strategy and experience Tina Morrell told Customer Contact Week Digital ANZ that investing in and establishing a ‘voice of customer’ platform had been “critical” to driving the experience transformation.
“Our ‘voice of customer’ platform really has transformed our business. It was actually key to ensuring that our whole organisation could be customer-led and insight-driven in our decision-making,” Morrell said.
The ‘voice of customer’ program – and platform – allows the NRMA to collect and act on customer feedback in order to develop improved experiences.
“We can [use it to] identify emerging things sooner rather than later,” Morrell said.
She added that the NRMA’s digital investment in tools and capability to date “has been significant.”
Part of the success so far came from making data accessible to all parts of the company.
“The most important thing that this platform has done is ‘democratise’ the data at all levels, so we’ve got dashboards, access to customer feedback and the verbatim [feedback] right from the frontline,” Morrell said.
“That’s probably been the most critical success factor, is that we’ve got frontline teams using and embracing this to help understand how they are going within the customer experience touchpoints in the journey.”
Nimble and agile
The ‘voice of customer’ platform allows the NRMA to view customer statistics. It then uses text analytics tools to identify the main drivers behind customer satisfaction scores, allowing Morrell’s team to make changes.
Cross-functional teams, comprising six to eight people, work on sprints to solve problems identified across a variety of segments in the business.
They focus on digital experience, membership renewals and regular communication to customer pain points are being addressed.
“It’s a really great way for us to become far more adaptive, responsive and agile in responding to those areas of opportunities to improve on in those critical customer journeys,” Morrell said.
“It’s actually identified some longer term solutions that where we might need a heavier CapEx to invest to improve. That’s actually guiding our roadmap for next year.”
Morrell said that the NRMA recontacted members that had pointed out experience issues and showed them how the issues had been addressed.
“One of the biggest wins that I would say throughout this process has been what we call ‘closing the loop’,” she said.
“What we’ve done is actually gone back to customers saying, Thank you so much for your feedback. We’ve actually used your feedback to make this change’.
“The feedback and response from customers on that has been overwhelming.”
Morrell said the effort had substantially reduced levels of dissatisfaction, leading to a boost in the NRMA’s net promoter score (NPS), which is a common measure of sentiment in customer service-led industries.
Personas and guiding principals
As part of the transformation, the NRMA sought to identify key demographics in its member base and understand emotional drivers for customer behaviours.
“We have done an amazing amount of research to develop our personas, to understand their behaviours, to understand their emotional drivers,” Morrell said.
Through this, the NRMA was able to develop new ideas and run “customer discovery workshops” which assisted teams to stay focused on core issues.
“We’ve used this to develop new propositions, but it also forms the basis for customer discovery workshops where we really bring an entire team together to ensure that we’re trying to fix a problem, or develop something new that we actually keeping in mind the persona that we’re really targeting for,” Morrell said.
The NRMA also developed personas for staff as well, on the basis that “delivering a great employee experience delivers a great customer experience.”
Morrell added that embedding “CX guiding principles” and equipping staff with the right frameworks and tools as they worked through the new changes ensured consumer trust in the digital process remained at the forefront of the transformation.
These reflected core values of the NRMA – reliable, trusted and helpful – which were identified by asking members and non-members alike how the organisation is viewed.
“Our customers expect a trusted experience, especially through digital, so we need to bear that in mind when we’re delivering new experiences that they are trusted, that they are secure and it also needs to be informed [by ‘voice of customer’],” she said.
“We need to be using our learnings to actually deliver the new experience.”
