Vodafone New Zealand (now One NZ) had experienced rapid growth via a number of strategic mergers and acquisitions which led to a fragmented customer experience and a declining market share.

Building a deep understanding of the customer journey and a clear strategic action plan to enable the experience transformation allowed One NZ to become the market leader within four years.

Redefining a telecom

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What we did

Cultural immersion

Our first step was to gain insight into of the New Zealand market and culture. Before carrying out primary research, we did the following:

  • Secondary research to understand the telecoms market in NZ

  • Secondary research to understand Kiwis and their culture

A winding wooden walkway through grassy plains in a mountainous landscape with snow-capped peaks under a blue sky.

Understanding the journey

The key to the journey was to formulate a deep understanding of the customer journey, both from an emotional side and practical side. Where does a telecom has the “right to play” - where do they fit in people’s lives?

To do this, we combined quantitative and qualitative methodologies:

  • Worked with the quant research lead on quantitative research, mapping emotional responses to parts of customer journey

  • Crafted and ran a diary study on connectivity in everyday lives and connectivity in NZ

A red and white racing sailboat with Vodafone branding sailing on blue water near a green hillside under a clear blue sky with scattered white clouds.

Digging deeper

Whilst the two research streams were providing excellent data, we needed more. Here’s what we did to gain an even deeper understanding of the customer experience:

  • Visited a number of Vodafone NZ and competitors’ stored across New Zealand to observe customer interaction

  • Consulted with the customer support teams to understand the issues they were getting contacted about and how they were currently handling them

  • Carried out depth interviews with the teams who were directly or indirectly touching the customer journey

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Making it real

We knew how customers felt about their telecoms providers, we knew which parts of the journey were problematic and we knew what was holding the company back from overcoming the internal issues. We did not yet know what the ideal experience looked like. To understand this we carried out co-creation workshops:

  • We asked customers across the country to work with us to “build their ideal telco”. More than the ideas they were coming up with, we paid attention to how they talked about this ideal company and what they found valuable when coming up with ideas.

  • We worked with the internal teams in the same format, paying attention to the objections they were coming up with, potential workarounds they saw to this and what really mattered to them in terms of getting projects over the line.

A detailed table outlining Vodafone's consumer experience journey with stages from awareness to usage, including challenges, touchpoints, and strategies for customer engagement.

Bringing it all together

We now worked on combining all this information into a coherent and actionable strategy. To do this, we created:

  • An end to end journey map detailing key customer goals, emotional drivers, experience principles, company objectives, tasks and channels, measurement and KPIs

  • A three-year prioritised roadmap of projects to deliver on key experience improvements with overview descriptions of each of the 60+ projects alongside ease and impact assessment

  • Strategic alignment workshops with senior leadership team to ensure the strategy was well communicated across the organisation