New problem
Delivering experience-led change
Contact Energy has been on a transformational journey to become a customer-centric organisation. In May 2020, Contact partnered with Deloitte Digital to help them take a leap forward in digital innovation, efficiency, and to build capability within their team to deliver experience-led change.
Together, Contact and Deloitte Digital mobilised a joint End-to-End (E2E) Journeys squad to look across the entire customer journey, and transform interactions with Contact into a world-class experience while delivering operational efficiencies and benefits to the business. Across 18 weeks, the E2E squad took a deep dive into Contact’s processes, data and technology, and engaged with consumers across New Zealand to redesign the experience.
The project was conducted during New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown through virtual collaboration and communication tools. This virtual environment unlocked an opportunity to reach customers in remote geographical locations in a simple and seamless way and enabled the squad to work together across multiple locations around the country.
Redesigning customer experience
New ideas
A human-centred approach
A human-centred approach was adopted to understand the needs, behaviours and motivations of customers across the energy sector and retail environment. Contact and Deloitte Digital worked collaboratively to interview customers and employees informing the creation of key customer needs, guiding principles and customer behavioural profiles. The breadth of this research covered multiple locations, a diverse range of family profiles and energy providers.
The team completed a technology system review and utilised Deloitte’s Digital Maturity Assessment to understand the current technology system landscape, the organisation’s digital maturity, and identify opportunities for improvement. The outside-in view generated by the customer research was synthesised against the inside-out review of Contact’s people, process and technology enablers. Through this process opportunity themes emerged, along with the overarching future state design.
At the end of the 18 weeks, the team had stood up two new squads to progress the delivery of priority future-state initiatives, and delivered a customer experience blueprint and roadmap articulating the future customer narrative. Contact is committed to spending the next 18 months transforming the blueprint into operational solutions.
New growth
Delivering efficiencies, redefining value
Tighe Wall, Contact’s Chief Digital Officer, said “The Deloitte Digital team understood our ambition to become a best-in-class retailer and brought a wealth of talent and global insights to the programme. I appreciated the team’s ability to help deliver experience-driven outcomes while keeping focus on value. They quickly became trusted partners and integrated into our digital, and broader, organisation.”
The digitisation of customer interactions and reduction of manual effort in the contact centres will enable cost efficiencies and a positive change in customer experience outcomes. Contact now has capability to help identify, test, frame and validate experience-led design ideas.
A human-centred approach to understand the needs, behaviours and motivations of customers to deliver experience-led change.