Putting The Customer At The Heart Of Bolton Clarke

Challenge

Bolton Clarke is a not-for-profit provider of independent living services through at-home support, retirement living and residential aged care. They are undergoing a significant amount of change with recent acquisitions and are keen to ensure they continue to operate inline with their purpose: to help people live a life of fulfilment. They strive to be provider of choice for prospective customers.

Bolton Clarke are establishing a comprehensive Customer Program to define priorities to tangibly improve the customers experience in line with customer expectations. Mapping the current state customer experience journey will highlight the key pain points and opportunities, thus providing a clear indication on the core areas for Bolton Clarke to enhance.

Approach

Co-create customer journey maps and design solutions to ensure tangible outcomes to improve the residents’ experience.

The project commenced with a document review of the existing processes and stakeholder mapping to identify the key types of customers and staff at Bolton Clarke for each of their core business areas:

• Retirement living (RL)
• Residential aged care (RAC)
• At-home support (AHS)

Following this, extensive customer research was conducted including the following:

• Workshops with key staff representatives from each of the core business areas to map out the end-to-end customer journey from an inside-out perspective and develop personas for each journey
• One-on-one customer interviews and focus groups with different customers and their family members to understand their current customer experiences, pain points and unmet needs
• Site observations at aged care homes, retirement living villages and customers’ houses across NSW, VIC and QLD to observe how customers interact in their environment.

Outcomes

By implementing robust customer experience priorities that connects customers to Bolton Clarke services seamlessly, Bolton Clarke can meet its vision to shape the future with its customers at the heart of the organisation and foster trust, loyalty and advocacy.

The insights gained from the document review, workshops, interviews, focus groups and site observations were utilised to design detailed end-to-end customer journey maps for each of the core business areas (RL, RAC and AHS). These journey maps captured the following key elements:

• Stages: Including the high-level journey and more detailed stages a customer moves through in their journey at Bolton Clarke
• Customer Perspective: Including the customer actions, emotions, expectations and pain points they experience
• Employee Perspective: Including both the front stage actions performed by employees that are visible to customers and the backstage actions not visible to customers
• Business Perspective: Including the supporting technology and processes that enable the customer experience and any business pain points that hinder it.

Following the generation of the journey maps, we facilitated solutions workshops to generate opportunities and ideas to help alleviate the pain points and bottlenecks identified in each customer journey.