Aligning cross-channel customer strategy

The challenge

Together with a number of bureaux and national helplines, Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) offers legal, consumer and political advice to the public. As they operate independently, their clients were having an inconsistent experience across each of these channels.

CAS asked us to identify who their users were, and to use that understanding to review all channels and touchpoints from a client’s needs and requirements perspective.

The outputs would define the direction of the service offering and get buy-in for any alignment across channels moving forwards.

Our approach

Using a mixture of research and evaluation, over a number of months we helped the team develop a strategy to operate and engage with the wider organisation. This included:

• Working closely with key stakeholders to understand business requirements from the management level.
• Mystery ‘shops’ of the online and telephone service, visits to bureaux, as well as interviews with staff, to gain firsthand experience of the service.
• Focus groups to understand what clients thought of the service and how it could be improved.

User testing session

The result

The combination of research and evaluation highlighted inconsistencies across the service offering and allowed us to create:

• Detailed personas (this will open in a new window)highlighting who the end clients were and they needed in terms of support and how.
• Customer journey maps identifying how these personas interacted with the organisations across the various touch points. 
• A detailed digital Road Map to support the implementation of a client-focused and unified approach.

To aid in socialisation of our findings, and support CAS in implementing change, we ran several workshops and larger presentations of the results. We also created a video that brought the personas to life and illustrated how the front-line staff could meet the varying needs of their clients in a consistent manner. Getting buy-in to a shared vision of consistency was a key outcome and one that CAS are rolling out across their customer-facing channels today.