Published on the 22/10/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Customer experience is relevant not only to commercial entities, but also to those providing government and other services…

That’s the position of Sid Miller, chief customer officer at the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC). He is to present at next month’s Customer Experience Excellence conference taking place in Auckland.

The organisation at which Miller holds the position has no competition and it is a government company – yet, he stresses, customer experience is ‘hugely important’. “We’re here to serve the customers of New Zealand. We take that responsibility very seriously and have learned many lessons from the past that we have to listen to what our customers need and how they need it.”

His is a new role which he has occupied for about a year; it is reflective of a groundswell towards customer service which is being experienced across the public and private sectors. “The key bit for us has been trying to understand what is it that our customers want,” said Miller.

“While we had a view on it, it was necessary to actually go out and ask them, as often, what you might think customers want can be quite different to what they actually want.”

Miller’s issue isn’t one which is unique to ACC. Many organisations are faced with a similar challenge, one that gets more complex as different groups of customers and even different departments within the same organisation tend to have divergent views. “No-one could answer what ‘customer experience’ meant for any particular group. There were a range of views across the business, so we needed to go out and ask our customers themselves.”

That sort of research is an invaluable first step to setting the foundation for the delivery of a satisfactory customer experience across a complex organisation. “From the research we conducted across the length and breadth of the country, we have distilled the issues and problems, built an ideal customer journey to understand how we could deliver a better experience, and created a target operating model. From that, we’ve gone backwards to what we do have today and what don’t have, what need to develop, and planned how to change the organisation to operate in a way that delivers a great experience,” said Miller.

The journey on which he has set ACC provides valuable insight into how to tackle what can be a challenging and even somewhat amorphous issue for many businesses. “Nobody comes to work to deliver a poor customer experience, but what [employers] have to ask themselves is, how do you enable your people to deliver a great experience? It is a moving target, with some components measurable and others, such as the personal touch, less so.

“But what we have found is that this is a people before process issue.”

Customer experience, said Miller, should be fundamental to customer facing organisations. “It’s about understanding the core reason for the existence of your organisation, then creating the best delivery to achieve the targeted outcomes. By focusing on customer experience, we will also deliver those services more efficiently and address the areas that concern our customers most.”

Miller is presenting on ACC’s journey at the Customer Experience Excellence, from 11 – 13 November at the Crowne Plaza hotel.