McMillan Shakespeare
Mapping the customer experience to unlock a 50% productivity target
We partnered with The McMillan Shakespeare Group to put customers at the centre of their largest-ever business transformation, uncovering where operational silos were creating friction and identifying concrete opportunities to streamline the sales and onboarding experience across Maxxia and RemServ.
Outcomes
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Delivered end-to-end service blueprints for novated leasing and salary packaging that exposed where handoffs, jargon, and siloed processes were costing customers and the business
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Gave the Beyond 2020 transformation program a customer-grounded strategy to prioritise initiatives against
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Identified specific opportunities to reduce touchpoints, simplify language, and better serve hard-to-reach customer segments like shift workers
Services
- Service Design
- Strategy Design
- Customer experience
Sectors
The need for transformation
The McMillan Shakespeare Group has serviced thousands of Australian customers through their consumer-facing brands Maxxia and RemServ, becoming a leading supplier of salary packaging and novated leasing products.
But rapid growth had come at a cost. Business units had developed their own processes independently, and customers were falling through the gaps between them. The Group's Beyond 2020 program — the largest transformation initiative they had ever undertaken — aimed to increase productivity by 50% and revenue by 30%. To hit those targets, they needed a customer experience strategy that could evolve ahead of consumer mobility trends and future market disruptors.
We worked alongside the McMillan Shakespeare team to engage directly with customers about their experiences with the brand, and with Maxxia and RemServ staff to interrogate the existing operational model and pinpoint where efficiency was being lost.
Data visualisation of the customers and staff interviewed as part of the project
What customers were actually experiencing
Our research revealed a deeply siloed organisation. Business units ran on different operating models, had little visibility into each other's processes, and even used different terminology for the same products and procedures.
That internal fragmentation had worked well enough within each team — it had allowed deep specialisation and contributed to the Group's growth. But for customers moving through the sales and onboarding process, the experience was a different story. They were passed between teams that didn't share context, encountered inconsistent language that made simple products sound confusing, and missed out on the kind of joined-up, human service they'd come to expect from other brands.
Excerpt from the service journey map
Redesigning the journey around real customer needs
Our journey maps revealed specific moments where the experience broke down — and where the biggest opportunities sat. We mapped the experience from two perspectives: the Group's partner companies and their end users. Both maps exposed concrete intervention points to improve service and strip out unnecessary complexity.
Three priorities stood out: reducing the number of handoff points customers had to navigate across the journey, replacing internal jargon with plain language that made products easier to understand, and designing around the real constraints of their core consumer group — for example, shift workers who can't take phone calls at work during business hours.
The journey maps gave the Group a holistic view of their own processes for the first time. They became a tool for disrupting entrenched practices, re-prioritising initiatives, and aligning previously disconnected teams around a shared focus: the customer experience.
Service concept for face fo face meetings
