The challenge
Engineers Australia (EA) is the peak body for the engineering profession in Australia, with a purpose to 'Advance society through great engineering'.
A proud organisation with over 100 years of history, EA wanted to change its relationship with its members. While retention remained high every year, most customers were not engaging with EA’s services. EA was looking to establish a more active and meaningful relationship with their members that would deliver greater value to the engineering profession, but they are unsure about how to proceed.
EA has a deep affection for its members, but its business units lacked a clear definition or strategy to generate value. Despite conducting a significant amount of customer research over 6 years, the recommendations from each endeavour were not actionable, and initiatives struggled to gain traction. Addtionally, EA's business units were operating in silos, each striving to meet the needs of members but failing to create meaningful value in isolation.
The situation
The approach
The research
The findings
The solution
We have developed a CX toolkit for EA to become more customer-centric. The toolkit includes customer segments, jobs-to-be-done framework, emotional drivers framework, and customer experience principles. By using these tools, EA can better understand their member's needs, use a common language to talk about members across the business, find unmet member needs and gaps in current services, and think about how to serve members better in the future.
Along with this, we have co-designed a customer strategy. We conducted workshops to define the kind of relationship EA wanted with its members and used the results to develop a shared aspiration for the future. The aspiration guided our decisions about which opportunities to prioritise, and we created customer promises (validated through customer testing) that describe how to bring these opportunities to life and create advocacy. The strategy was designed to help EA make decisions about future initiatives, focus on where they can get the biggest return on their investment, and think about their value proposition in terms of how they can meet the needs of engineers, rather than just their existing suite of products.
To make the strategy more tangible, we developed a set of concepts that represented specific pieces of scope that could be sized priorities and sequenced.
The impact
Our team's work led to the development of a common language about customers across EA, which helped to bring the entire business together. We communicated our strategy to different business units, and everyone, from executives to front-line staff, recognised the need for a new approach that would enable EA to become customer-centric.
The Customer Promises and Customer Principles we designed have supported the redesign of some membership experiences, which has resulted in a clear boost in engagement.