Design Research 2021 Day 1 - Kate Hardgrave

Finding the Sweet Spot: Leveraging Insights to Shape Strategic Direction I work in the Australian superannuation industry – an industry which is complex, typically conservative, highly regulated and characterised by customer apathy and disengagement. We’ve been striving to drive customer-centric change at UniSuper for 3-4 years now, leveraging research to reverse engineer processes and shift mindsets. In 2019, I co-presented our journey mapping journey at Design Research alongside my colleague, Leah Mackenzie. This is “Chapter 2” of my story. It’s about what happened when the groundswell we had created resulted in a breakthrough moment: Customer Experience (CX) having a seat at the decision-making table. This presentation will cover my experiences leading a small CX team to influence UniSuper’s strategic direction through organisation-wide collaboration. It’s about what we did with our seat, and how we did it, to ensure that the voice of the customer was heard authentically all the way up to Board level. I’ll cover using insights to drive action through codesign of enterprise initiatives, and lessons learned when addressing both business and customer needs over the course of 9 months. This talk is for anyone who is grappling with the challenge of translating customer insights into strategic action. How can we advance the business impact of research?