Welcoming new partners
We embarked on projects with some brilliant new partners last year, including:
- Airbus
- British Airways
- British Council
- BP
- Department of Health and Social Care
- NHS Transformation Directorate – Innovation Lab
We’ve also worked with Burberry, booking.com, Farfetch and River Island on design sprints via our Google Labs program.
Working with these partners and our existing clients, we’ve carried out transformative pieces of work (more on this below), looking at how the whole organisation can be set up to focus on meeting user needs more effectively by bringing in a culture of customer centricity throughout the business.
We’re excited to continue our work together in 2023 to create positive change, not only within the organisations themselves, but also for our wider society.
Giving a voice to people detained under the Mental Health Act
A new Government policy is being introduced to allow people who are being detained under the Mental Health Act (MHA) to document their needs in advance of being detained so that in the future, their care can be more appropriate, individual, and in line with their wishes. We’ve been working with the NHS Transformation Directorate to detail the best way to gather this information that both puts those being detained at the centre, and facilitates the best mechanism for staff to capture and action their needs.
Over 6 months, we worked in a combined team with the NHS and DHSC to look at the existing service and the introduction of Advance Choice Documents (ACDs) to: understand, prototype, and explore potential solutions; review and influence policy; and create a plan for rolling out ACDs for usage.
Developing a deep understanding of the complex existing system allowed us to find the best opportunities to introduce ACDs that will require the least change in behaviour, but the most benefit for service users.
Ultimately, we provided the Department of Health and Social Care with clarity on what was needed to implement the new policy. cxpartners and NHSE&I are planning to continue supporting local teams through implementation, ensuring service user and service provider needs continue to be balanced and met.
Improving experiences for energy customers and employees
As one of the UK’s largest energy firms, SSE generates renewable energy. With an ambitious vision to be a leading energy company in a net zero world, cxpartners were appointed to drive radical business change to support this goal.
Using our Customer Centricity Model, we developed a change programme for running high-performing capabilities across People, Processes, Governance, Facilities, and Communications. To do this, we established a design studio within the organisation. This enabled them to deliver digital self-service products to market twice as fast, which solved customer challenges more effectively and reduced the reliance on support agents and the cost of manual intervention. Thus making everyday life easier for millions of energy customers.
Not only have SSE recognised the value of taking a user centred approach to designing experiences for their customers, but they have also decided that we should bring our practice to improve the experiences for their employees too.
Benchmarking a leading bank’s design maturity, to enable transformation
For its transformation programme to succeed, a tier-1 UK bank that we have been working with needed to re-think its services. But it’s CMO knew that the company couldn’t do that without improving its design maturity. Good design is about understanding and solving problems. It ensures that products and services fit customers’ needs, behaviours, and preferences. Good practice was happening within the group, but like most large organisations, it wasn’t being applied consistently.
To plan the change, the bank needed to understand what capability it had and the environment in which design operated. It chose cxpartners to lead this important discovery work. We conducted design maturity assessments, engaged in workshops with designers, change leaders, and developers, and interviewed senior stakeholders across the company. We provided a robust benchmark, identified five key problems and recommended how to unlock significant value from design.
