Post Office Transformation

Developing a 5 year vision for the future direction of the Post Office
Design Research and Service Design
4 Months, full time starting mid July - Nov 2017

Australia Post has the largest retail footprint in the country, compromising 4,300 Post Offices (PO), 70% of which are licensed Post Offices with the remainder ‘wholly owned’ corporate stores.

With the local high street at risk and retail needing to reinvent itself, the customer experience design team were tasked with creating a future vision of the Post Office to define the role and relevance of the Post Office in people’s lives.
The team comprised three designers from Australia Post and three from our partner design agency, Craig Walker.

My first job was to recruit, plan for and conduct customer research in metro and regional Victoria. Buddying up into pairs, my partner and I spent half a day with each of our 6 consumers and 4 small businesses conducting contextual inquiries, observing and listening to people in context; shadowing and observing peoples’ journey in the Post Office to deeply understand customer needs, motivations and potential opportunities for the Post Office.

Next we spoke to various people across Head Office to understand their perspective on the Post Office network, areas of focus and points of failure. A number of themes emerged from our discovery research and were used to develop 6 problem statements and three challenge statements to go forward into ideation.

Organising and preparing materials for the ideation sessions,

25 stakeholders attended the two day working studio

helping to identify in-flight initiatives and generate ideas.. Fun.

We visualised our work and displayed it in ‘the nook’,

a small but functional space ideal for regular showcases with our diverse stakeholders.

Engagement and buy-in was critical to the project's success.

‘The nook’ became the meeting space for conversations, feedback and progress

throughout the project.

Ultimately our team delivered a vision, set of principles, 3 short films and robust set of 7 service

concepts with 21 components and implementation plan for the Post Office Network.

The work was detailed in a Discovery pack and Vision Playbook.

Together with the lead designer, we ran various playback sessions with more than 100 stakeholders

to share progress and get buy-in to the strategic direction. We presented the final report to the

CEO and Executive team and the work is now being used to inform current strategy and investment.

Delivering best of industry expertise in strategic, service and business design
Various projects including:
Concession Cardholders; Attempted Delivery Notifications; Customer Help & Support; Revamp
(corporate social responsibility project); Small Business Sending
Design research, customer journey maps, service blueprint, prototypes
8 months, full time Dec 2017 - July 2018

The customer experience design team is effectively an in-house design agency.

Created to provide design thinking expertise and business support to units across

Australia Post. The team helped to accelerate initiatives that would sustainably

transform and fundamentally improve customers’ experiences.

Typically projects focused on discovery and ideation phases to provide insights into customer needs and motivations, identify opportunity spaces and develop final reports that informed strategic road maps or business cases.

As a small design team (total 3) we had to be inventive, nimble and accountable for end-to-end delivery of our projects, typically across a 12 week period.

This involved taking a brief from the stakeholder ‘client’, developing an approach, conducting stakeholder “lightning talks” and market scans, recruitment and research, synthesis, design and delivery of workshops, developing concepts, customer journey maps or service blueprints and final report writing.

During my 12 months on the team I gained experience in:

Market scans
Stakeholder mapping
Service safaris
Developing research criteria, recruitment briefs, directly sourcing interviewees or via research agencies
Conducting interviews, intercepts, contextual inquiries, focus groups
Designing and facilitating synthesis sessions, ideation workshops, interactive working studios, co-design sessions including preparation of materials

Creating more consistent and distinctive Australia Post experiences
Significant stakeholder engagement, discovery through to pilot
Full time July 2018 – November 2019

The marketing team wanted to engage the workforce and bring the brand to life across every interaction. As the Head of Brand put it, “ Bridge the gap from fluff to stuff ”.

I was asked to take on the role of brand experience manager and had sole responsibility for the work. I consulted widely across the business to understand business appetite for and willingness to engage on brand experience and then developed a comprehensive year-long program of work. This included building an eco-system map to understand who influences the customer experience and how different departments interact with each other.

There were two audiences for this strategy - Head Office decision makers and the Frontline - the customer-facing teams who actually deliver the experience.

My approach was to start small, engage a small number of people to create a"coalition of the willing"and implement small scale, rapid improvement and iteration, co-creating with Frontline and Head Office teams to create a solution that was the

perfect fit. A small, business working group was established to shape, co-design, test and iterate all ideas; creating cross functional learning and greater collaboration with the brand at the heart of their design and decision making.

Ultimately there were three key outputs:
1 A set of Brand Experience Principles: creating a customer experience standard for the entire workforce, focusing on actions and behaviours that would create competitive advantage. The final principles pack explained how teams could start to practically consider brand experience

in their work. It included a set of guidelines to make the purpose and values actionable for all departments with examples to show people what to do for customers.

2 A universal journey - a single view of the touchpoints across the customer journey agnostic of product or service.
It highlighted key customer needs and where the brand principles could be applied to create a more distinctive and consistent experience. The journey was created using over 60 data inputs including existing customer journeys,

product research, complaints and NPS data and provided a common view and language to align different teams around

customer experience.

3 Moments That Matter - a toolkit for people leaders to focus on 1 or 2 small actions that make a big difference to customers.
Working with Craig Walker design agency over 12 weeks, we ran a series of workshops and interviews with more than 60 people across the business.

We prioritised the ideas, tested two concepts, ran two pilots at Port Melbourne

and North Melbourne delivery centres and a train-the trainer program with the

Northwest Retail Network.

Beyond guidelines, people needed to connect to the brand story and understand how

they could bring it to life for customers when it really mattered – creating a sense of pride,

empowerment and focus.

Over the 6 weeks of the pilot, there was an 80% improvement in delivering incorrectly addressed parcels and a 90% reduction in complaints regarding the mail redirection service. 90% of the participants would ‘highly recommend’ the program and were equally ‘highly likely’ to continue to apply Moments That Matter in their work.

As a result the Moments That Matter program was adopted nationally across 30 Delivery Centres; 8 Post Offices and Licenced Post Offices across 5 States and Territories as well as forming part of the Customer Contact Centre plans for Q3 (Jan-April 2020.)