Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your career journey and how you came to be in a CX role?

A: So, my journey is a little bit different. I’m from New Zealand and spent 20 years in the New Zealand air force in a uniform role. I came over to Australia 10 years ago and joined Healthshare. I’ve been there for 10 years and have had 6 different roles within the organisation. Two years ago, I was appointed to the role of Director of Customer Experience.

In my role now, there are three key parts that I look after. I look after our contact centre which receives approximately 1500 customer interactions a day. I also look after payroll, finance and recruitment for NSW Health. And I have a small customer engagement team that looks after engaging with all the local health districts and meeting them on a regular basis to take on board their feedback. And then I have my customer experience team, looking after our customer value survey, doing things like journey mapping, and working with business units to help solve customer problems.

Q: Where would you say your organisation is at on the journey to customer-centricity?

A: Obviously we want to be a customer-centric organisation. Our CX dictorate is fairly new, it was established 2 years ago. We’ve been doing surveys a lot longer than that, but I guess CX is still more in its infancy and we’re building common blocks across the organisation on which to build on.

Q: What are you most excited about over the next 12 months?

A: We’ve just put our latest customer value survey into the field so it’s open for the next 3 weeks, so I’m excited but nervous about the results and seeing how much we’ve moved the dial, and actually being able to take those insights and put them into action, and drive that improvement. It’s always good to see what customers are saying and then being able to make some plans and saying, right these are the next things we need to be able to work on to improve.

Q: What would you say has been your biggest achievement or proudest moment in your career so far?

A: I’ve worked on some really great projects in my time in the military and also while I’ve been here at Healthshare in terms of some big transformation and change projects. But I guess my first customer value survey result was a really proud moment because we could actually see the dial starting to move with an increase in customer satisfaction and engagement. So it was really rewarding for the team in such a short space of time, we had managed to lift the profile and get people talking and excited about it, and really start to want our services, and actively engage with us to try to help them. That’s been a really great ‘a-ha’ moment where we can see we’re making positive change across the organisation, reflective in our customer survey and our people matters engagement survey, and we can really see people responding well to what we’re doing.

Q: What advice would you give to your peers about being the best CX professional you can be?

A: I have two bits of advice. I’m really proud of the team that we’ve built over the last two years – we’ve got a really great team that’s really inquisitive, they love learning and pushing the boundaries. So I’m really proud of the culture that we’ve built and have in our team, and their willingness to give things a go. So surround yourself with a great team. And then, sometimes just remembering ‘What would the customer think about this?’ and have we asked them? As a shared service organisation, sometimes we can do things that make it easier for us, and I see it so many times across our organisation, but does it really improve things for our customers? Let’s take it back to basics to ask what the customer would think of that if we asked them.