CLIENT: ERNST & YOUNG
Understanding the connectedness of our Corporate Income Tax clients to our services to build competitive advantage
PROJECT CONTEXT
An exciting opportunity to work with one of the ‘Big Four’ consultancy firms in Australia committed to HCD (human- centred design). The project formed part of a two-year, transformation journey for the business who wanted to elevate the current, customer experience of their CIT (Corporate Income Tax) clients, using this to gain competitive advantage.
EY’s current CIT offering is technologically advanced with rigorous, internal processes in place, however, senior leaders recognised the opportunity to overlay the customer lens across client interactions using HCD.
PROJECT PROCESS
We worked closely with a Sydney-based, EY Director who assembled a core project team from the CIT division - individual team members were located across multiple Australian cities meaning that the project was conducted remotely for its duration. Whilst this could be perceived as challenging, the project team were committed and threw themselves into collaboration with one another and any perceived barriers disappeared instantly.
We began with a phase of design research as part of the Discover phase - EY specifically chose to interview both external clients and the internal teams tasked with delivery of CIT services. This approach lead to a thorough understanding of both sets of ‘users’ of the service offering.
Next, we followed the phases of Define and Develop with the CIT teams working on the Deliver phase in-house. The outcome of this project has been positively viewed by the business and a sister project has since begun with the New Zealand CIT division.
PROJECT OUTPUTS
The design outputs have enabled the various CIT teams to see the experiences of their clients in a coherent way. They have also been pertinent in assisting senior leaders in making strategic decisions:
-
Building the project team’s capability in conducting customer interviews
-
Customer profiles, robust insights and How Might We statements were produced as part of the Define phase of the project
-
Online ideation workshops using the tool, Mural, which allowed for a collaboration between Australian and NZ based teams
-
High-level summary of concepts for continued iteration and sharing with other internal stakeholders
As part of the Discover and Define phases we interviewed a diverse group of EY’s clients as well as the internal CIT teams. The stories we elicited from clients lead to the crafting of customer profiles, enabling the EY team to ‘walk in the shoes’ of their clients and deeply understand their experiences as they interfaced with EY.
Working with EY’s Australia meant video calls/meetings were a normal part of the project. We collaborated remotely throughout its duration - this is an example of the project team located in five different cities ideating against How Might We statements using EY’s preferred interactive tool. It worked surprisingly well.
Example of Define - the framework used for the hybrid customer journey/service blueprint
