Delivering exceptional & sustainable experiences for university alumni

THE CHALLENGE

Covid-19 has profoundly disrupted the higher education sector in Australia and globally, with students, alumni and staff suddenly being unable to connect face-to-face. As a consequence, it has accelerated the need to rethink the end-to-end student, staff and alumni experience to adapt to our new ‘digital everything and everywhere’ world. The UTS Advancement team are taking on that challenge and want to become a leading audience-centric organisation that delivers a superior experience to its students, alumni and staff.

THE APPROACH

The Advancement Team engaged The Strategy Group to assist with the design of an ambitious CX Strategy. A leading-edge Human-Centred Design approach was adopted to ‘put the customer at the centre’ of this project and shape an effective and actionable CX Strategy for UTS Advancement.

The following activities were conducted over the course of the project:

CX Vision Workshop: Ran a strategic workshop to craft a vision and design principles that support the CX Strategy
In-depth Customer Research: Conducted 28 1:1 empathetic interviews with the identified audience groups of the UTS Advancement community (alumni, donors, organisations, trusts & foundations), complemented by best practice desktop research
Customer Journey Mapping: Synthesised data captured from interviews to inform clear customer insights (drivers & barriers), detailed customer journey maps for each key audience group and areas of improvements
Implementation Roadmap Working Session: Consolidated areas of improvement into key CX capabilities and ran a collaborative session to map the defined capability actions in a short-, medium- & long-term implementation roadmap

THE OUTCOME

Thanks to this engagement, UTS Advancement Team is now equipped with:

1. A clear action-oriented roadmap that will deliver the expected CX ‘gold standard’ experience which will increase alumni and donor acquisition, engagement and retention

2. A CX Strategy report to engage with the broader UTS Advancement ecosystem (internal stakeholders, partners, etc.) and communicate the Advancement CX ambition and priorities

3. CX artefacts (journey maps, drivers, barriers, areas of improvement, etc.) to immerse and educate team members and partners around CX and customer-centricity (e.g. creation of a CX Immersion Room)