The Winner Spotlight series features video interviews with CX Awards winners, sharing insights, inspirations, and stories from their incredible entries.

You won CX Team of the Year at The CX Awards 2023. How does it feel 6 months on from the lifting the trophy at the awards ceremony? 

Charles: We continue to feel privileged and honoured to have accepted the award on behalf of all our colleagues across Optus. It continues to inspire us to work as hard as we possibly can to build on the successes we’ve had to become Australia’s most loved everyday brand with lasting customer relationships. It’s something that we continue to look back on, to look forward, to ensure that we are doing the best we can for our customers.

Can you share a little bit about the initiative that scored you the win?

Charles: Optus’ customer experience approach is quite unique. It is a whole of enterprise approach involving all our listening programmes, all our beta testing programmes, how we actually create end-to-end journeys and embed them in the business prior to launching anything in the market, whether that be a new digital feature, a new channel, or a new product range. And we make sure that there’s nothing left to chance, that our customers love it even before they’ve experienced it.

And in the end, that’s made us a much stronger organisation from a customer centric point of view, that we’re all involved end-to-end from our enterprise, and business, and consumer across all our digital and physical channels and across all our product lines. We’re stronger together and we work together to bring amazing customer experiences to life.

Can you share a little about the impact of this initiative and how you demonstrated this in your entry? 

Charles: A core differentiator in the Optus strategy is our Living Network strategy. And Living Network involves not just our app but our product lines, our networks team, our customer retention teams and our closed loop feedback along with our CX team to deliver what our world first and unique experience is. So that customers can be in control of the Optus network and they can actually pause their network, they can actually turbocharge their experiences over their fixed and their mobile services.

This has been highly complex, technically challenging, a new customer experience that has involved co-creation across at least ten different business units and hundreds of customers in testing and prototyping. And it continues to roll out and be optimised. It’s created a huge lift in not just our NPS, but in our ability for our customers to understand how best to get the most out of our amazing network, which has the fastest 5G and also provides more control and more areas of flexibility than any other network that we know of on the planet.

What advice would you give to anyone thinking about entering this year?

Charles: If you feel passionate about your customer, if you feel passionate about the experiences your organisation can bring to your customers enter, give it a go.

Even if you don’t win, you’re surrounded by great businesses and great CX professionals who are doing things differently and they’re pushing the boundaries and pushing each other. And although we’re very proud to have won, we continue to be honoured to have accepted the award on behalf of all our colleagues at Optus. Even if we had not, it was an amazing experience to see how all our CX professionals across all industries are approaching their customer experiences and how they can be far better placed in a competitive and hypersensitive market.

The CX awards are the ultimate accolade to benchmark and recognise CX excellence in the ANZ region. Judged by an esteemed panel of your CX peers, the CX Awards go one step further in trying to differentiate the very best leaders, teams, strategies and innovations..