Building a Future-Ready Retirement Living Experience for Oak Tree

At The Strategy Group, we recently partnered with a NSW government agency to develop a groundbreaking natural capital profiling service for farmers. Here's how we turned vision into reality through co-design.

The Challenge

OakTree Group, part of Aware Super, set out to better understand and improve the resident experience across its 30+ retirement communities while preparing for the changing expectations of future customers. With Australia’s ageing population and shifting lifestyle aspirations, Oak Tree wanted to map the current resident journey, uncover the needs of the emerging 55+ market, and anticipate how Millennials will redefine retirement living, creating a customer experience strategy that meets today’s needs and future-proofs the business.

Our Approach: Co-Design at Its Core

Co-create end-to-end customer journeys and personas that empower Oak Tree to deliver purposeful, connected, and future-ready experiences

The Strategy Group designed a program combining human-centred design, customer research, and strategic foresight to help Oak Tree capture and anticipate the needs of current and future customers. Activities include:

• Conducted workshops with Oak Tree’s business, village and city hub teams to map the end-to-end customer experience from an inside-out perspective.
• Developed a detailed current state customer journey map, visualising customer actions, emotions, expectations, and the internal processes that support them.
• Identified key “moments that matter,” pain points, and operational bottlenecks to establish a clear baseline for improvement.
• Conducted 100 in-depth interviews with prospective residents aged 55+, across metro and regional areas.
• Developed detailed personas to represent behavioural segments within the 55+ market, capturing motivations, fears, aspirations, and lifestyle drivers.

The Outcome

By visualising today’s experience and forecasting tomorrow’s expectations, OakTree now has a clear strategic blueprint for customer-led transformation.

Through this engagement, The Strategy Group helped Oak Tree to:

• Visualise the full customer experience across multiple horizons - from current residents to future generations.
• Identify critical moments of truth and operational inefficiencies impacting satisfaction and trust.
• Establish data-backed customer personas representing key attitudinal and behavioural segments.
• Prioritise actionable opportunities for experience improvement, service innovation, and community engagement.
• Strengthen organisational alignment, enabling Oak Tree’s leadership to make customer-informed decisions that anticipate future market shifts.

Reflections

The resulting journey maps, insights reports, and personas have equipped Oak Tree to not only enhance today’s resident experience but also future-proof its offering — ensuring it remains the provider of choice for the next generation of retirees.