Reflecting on our impact in 2023

As we kick start 2024, it's time to reflect on the great things that we achieved last year and the impact we've made in collaboration with our partners. Together, our team built and strengthened relationships, forged new alliances and created positive change. Not only for our clients but also for wider society.

Read on to hear about our standout moments from 2023!

Last year we had the opportunity to work on some brilliant projects and engage with lots of new organisations including Milk & More, Booking.com, Sport England, Bank of Ireland and GambleAware. 

Alongside our new partners, we continued work with our existing clients and delivered a range of projects from discoveries right through to whole organisation transformations. We also ran 20 ‘Mobile Labs’ as Google’s user experience partner to help Google's biggest advertisers improve the performance of their mobile web by understanding their customers better. 

This year, we’ve already kicked off some fantastic programmes of work and are excited to see this continue throughout 2024.

To address customer feedback given to the Secretary of State for Transport, the CAA established a programme of organisational transformation - a key strategic pillar in their mission to become a modern regulator. As part of this challenge, they asked us to help them become more customer centred.

We led a Discovery to kick-start their transformation - taking their strategic objectives and vision, and investigating how effectively live services were performing against them.

We built a team of cxpartners and Sopra Steria experts and CAA staff, so that we could build capabilities as we delivered work.

CAA is a complex organisation which was new to user centred design, and - rightfully -  very risk averse; the team made a big impact in a short period of time by helping to set their direction and create significant momentum. 

We developed a strategic roadmap, identifying priority alphas/betas that needed to happen to improve the customer experience of the services we’d reviewed. 

This roadmap directly supported the business case and funding to progress CAA’s customer experience initiative, and establishment of internal user-centred design capability to deliver customer experience work.

We designed a self-service data capture journey that helped a financial services firm respond quickly and successfully to an FCA requirement, without burdening its own contact centre.

This market-leading FS firm asked us to help it improve the quality of its data, to support its conversations with the regulator.

It needed to deliver results quickly and needed to do so during tax-year-end – a busy time for its contact centre, which was already working at capacity. The firm couldn't afford to confuse its customers with complicated technical language (driving up call volumes and email requests), or to alarm them by clumsily asking for personal information that its customers might expect them to already have (risking trust and loyalty). Success relied on it creating intuitive, effective, digital self-service journeys.

We embedded ourselves within the firm’s team, and made light prototypes that we tested quickly. We iterated until we were confident that we'd positioned the requests clearly and agreeably, using methods designed to credibly test consumer understanding at each point in the user journey.

Working openly and decisively, we helped it meet its deadline.

And the results? Compared to the other channels it had tried (paper forms and an off-the-shelf application), the tailored digital journey we designed produced:

• More data (24% higher response rate)
• Higher quality data (lower error rates)
• Lower manual processing costs (reduced inbound calls)

Our dedication to customer-centric practices continued throughout 2023. Working closely with our partners, we embarked on programmes that emphasised the importance of putting customers at the heart of business strategy. 

We iterated our work, creating a new version of our self assessment specifically for public sector organisations, which will be publicly available soon, and held our second annual Customer Centricity Month.

Following on from our customer centricity work, we also launched our latest white paper: ‘Prioritising work in challenging times: Three effective strategies’. The report collated findings from our research into how organisations can stay competitive and do more with less, while still maintaining a customer-centric approach.

Throughout the year we wanted to share our knowledge and learnings with the wider community and speak on some of the most pressing topics facing organisations. 

Through a series of webinars and lunch and learn sessions, we engaged with industry experts and thought leaders on a range of topics. Our guest speakers from organisations including the FCA, Octopus Energy, carwow, Sport England, and Google added diverse perspectives to the discussions.

We also spoke at and attended lots of external conferences and events. To find out more about what our team got up to, check out our blog 'What our team got up to in 2023'.

As we gear up for 2024, here's a sneak peek into what lies ahead:

2024 should see a General Election - which brings both opportunities and challenges to those of us working with Government services and teams. We look forward to supporting our public services partners through any policy changes that we may see over the coming year.

We are excited about the upcoming launch of our public sector focused Customer Centricity model. And we’ll continue rolling out our Scan Map Measure framework to support organisations and teams to identify and roadmap the long-term impact of their service and provide an ongoing framework to measure both success along the way and the final results. 

We’ll also continue to ensure our clients understand the basics of good service design through our ongoing lunch and learn sessions, practical content about the Service Standard and tools and frameworks that teams can use to introduce and embed experience design. 

In the private sector, we're looking forward to sharing our latest thinking in Open Finance. We're looking at ways Open Finance can be used to make financial products more accessible and secure for consumers. In particular, we've been exploring how Open Finance data could be used in 2024 to help advice firms to scale and deliver more client value. Watch this space.

Consumer Duty came into force at the end of July 2023 - new rules from the FCA to help protect consumers across financial services, requiring firms to put customers' needs first. In 2024, we're looking forward to helping FS boards to submit their first annual Consumer Duty reports. 

Finally - look out for something very exciting - our new website is coming soon!