Co-creating a vision of a customer-centric future with Energy Safe Victoria

Supporting ESV through their transformation

As a safety-first regulator, Energy Safe Victoria (ESV) understands its future as an organisation increasingly-focused on customer experience and on harm-prevention strategies that are led and supported by data. However, like many regulatory agencies, ESV has historically had fewer opportunities to consider what customer-centricity means for them and how they can shift their workforce capably in that direction.

ESV engaged Paper Giant to run two streams of work. The first was to co-create an inspiring, meaningful organisational Vision and Values Statement that would establish a clear future direction and support the narrative around the transformation. The second was to create a customer experience (CX) strategy and detailed roadmap to help facilitate its successful implementation.

A participatory and iterative approach to strategy design

We used a participatory approach to engage many staff at all levels across the whole organisation—from executives to account service personnel—through a series of 12 workshops, an organisation-wide survey, and individual interviews with key people.

In line with our participatory strategy principles, we used ESV’s existing work as a launchpad to rapidly create prototypes of each key output. We then iterated our prototypes and ideas through our various staff engagements, refining and validating the final outcomes multiple times.

Building capability and culture around CX

One of our core goals was to help build momentum for a cultural shift within ESV towards the idea of customer-centricity. Our activities were designed to engage ESV staff in meaningful ways that allowed them to develop ownership and understanding around what customer-centricity might look like in practice for their organisation.

To create strong foundations, we used each touchpoint with ESV staff to address barriers to change, educate them about CX in contextually-relevant ways, and build shared capability towards customer-centricity. In addition, we created spaces that allowed people to reflect on how they could improve customer experiences today.

A new Vision and Values tatement that sets an inspiring direction

Once we understood what customer-centricity needs to look like in their business, we used the Paper Giant Vision Statement Framework to co-create a story that matters to ESV’s people.

Our final products included a concise and meaningful Vision, Purpose and Values document that can be used in many ways by different teams across the organisation to build momentum, cohesion and buy-in. The assets we delivered point in an exciting direction that reflects the thoughts and language of the organisation and its people.

We also co-created an engagement roadmap that articulates the connections between other initiatives and how ESV can implement, enact and embody its new Vision and Values throughout the business and over time.

Driving actionable change through a CX Strategy roadmap

Our final CX strategy connects to ESV’s purpose by clarifying how, as a regulator, customer experience can improve safety outcomes. The CX vision reflects four promises that contextualise the behaviours the whole organisation needs to follow to create consistent and effective experiences for those they serve.

It was important for the CX Strategy to include specific and practical actions staff could take to shift ESV into a shared customer-focused future. The roadmap we created from concepts gathered and vetted throughout our workshops does this by harnessing ESV’s strengths and actions that can be taken with their existing resources.

We designed the new strategy to be flexible and to support continual improvement as the organisation progresses through its transformation.