Making an impact - what cxpartners have been up to in 2022

As we begin the new year, we’ve been reflecting back on 2022. As always, I’m super proud of how much our team has achieved and the clients we’ve worked with. It really makes our mission come to life when we reflect back on all that we’ve done during the year.

We embarked on projects with some brilliant new partners last year, including:

• Airbus
• British Airways
• British Council
• BP
• Department of Health and Social Care
• NHS Transformation Directorate - Innovation Lab

We’ve also worked with Burberry, booking.com, Farfetch and River Island on design sprints via our Google Labs program. 

Working with these partners and our existing clients, we’ve carried out transformative pieces of work (more on this below), looking at how the whole organisation can be set up to focus on meeting user needs more effectively by bringing in a culture of customer centricity throughout the business. 

We’re excited to continue our work together in 2023 to create positive change, not only within the organisations themselves, but also for our wider society.

A new Government policy is being introduced to allow people who are being detained under the Mental Health Act (MHA) to document their needs in advance of being detained so that in the future, their care can be more appropriate, individual, and in line with their wishes. We’ve been working with the NHS Transformation Directorate to detail the best way to gather this information that both puts those being detained at the centre, and facilitates the best mechanism for staff to capture and action their needs. 

Over 6 months, we worked in a combined team with the NHS and DHSC to look at the existing service and the introduction of Advance Choice Documents (ACDs) to: understand, prototype, and explore potential solutions; review and influence policy; and create a plan for rolling out ACDs for usage. 

Developing a deep understanding of the complex existing system allowed us to find the best opportunities to introduce ACDs that will require the least change in behaviour, but the most benefit for service users.

Ultimately, we provided the Department of Health and Social Care with clarity on what was needed to implement the new policy. cxpartners and NHSE&I are planning to continue supporting local teams through implementation, ensuring service user and service provider needs continue to be balanced and met.

As one of the UK’s largest energy firms, SSE generates renewable energy. With an ambitious vision to be a leading energy company in a net zero world, cxpartners were appointed to drive radical business change to support this goal. 

Using our Customer Centricity Model, we developed a change programme for running high-performing capabilities across People, Processes, Governance, Facilities, and Communications. To do this, we established a design studio within the organisation. This enabled them to deliver digital self-service products to market twice as fast, which solved customer challenges more effectively and reduced the reliance on support agents and the cost of manual intervention. Thus making everyday life easier for millions of energy customers.

Not only have SSE recognised the value of taking a user centred approach to designing experiences for their customers, but they have also decided that we should bring our practice to improve the experiences for their employees too. 

For its transformation programme to succeed, a tier-1 UK bank that we have been working with needed to re-think its services. But it’s CMO knew that the company couldn’t do that without improving its design maturity. Good design is about understanding and solving problems. It ensures that products and services fit customers’ needs, behaviours, and preferences. Good practice was happening within the group, but like most large organisations, it wasn’t being applied consistently.

To plan the change, the bank needed to understand what capability it had and the environment in which design operated. It chose cxpartners to lead this important discovery work. We conducted design maturity assessments, engaged in workshops with designers, change leaders, and developers, and interviewed senior stakeholders across the company. We provided a robust benchmark, identified five key problems and recommended how to unlock significant value from design.

In addition to it being an incredible year for our client partnerships, it was also wonderful in that we welcomed a whole host of new people to our team. We saw 16 new people join us, bringing fresh perspectives from all over the globe and from different careers - and we’re still recruiting! 

Take a look at our ‘Welcoming our new team members of 2022’ blog to learn more about the brilliant people who have joined our team.

Last year, we launched our Customer Centricity Model and published our research into the Customer Centricity of 110 top European brands. The groundbreaking findings from our study can be found in our white paper, The State of Customer Centricity. In it, you’ll see that our research found that customer centric organisations grow faster, have more satisfied employees and are more nimble. Also in the report, you’ll find five key insights from our study that will help you to answer the question: how can my organisation be more customer centric?

We also released our self-assessment survey so that businesses can see for themselves how mature their customer centricity is, benchmark against their competitors and receive personalised recommendations for ways to improve. We’ve had hundreds of organisations complete the survey who are now well on their way to transforming their business around the needs of their customers and we are excited to see the trend continue throughout 2023.

Following on from our Customer Centricity work in 2022, we will be continuing to help organisations focus on the needs of their users with the second edition of our self-assessment tool. 

Our work on Customer Centricity has also kick started our next big topic: Prioritisation. We are currently conducting a study into how organisations prioritise work, and how this might change as we head into 2023. We’ll be publishing our research and resulting white paper on the topic in the spring which will provide organisations with insights around how to prioritise better, in other words, how to do more with less.

Within our Financial Services team, we’re also helping consumers consider environmental sustainability in their investment decisions. There is a lot of room for improvement, and it couldn’t be more urgent. There’s about £3 trillion invested in UK pensions and according to Make Money Matter, ‘Greening’ your pension is 21x more effective at cutting carbon than stopping flying, going veggie & switching energy supplier combined. But it’s not easy! Investment decisions are complicated already. But we have the tools to improve things, so that’s what we’re going to do.

And these topics aren’t just being looked at in Financial Services.. Inclusive design and sustainability are two of the big issues that we aim to focus on in all of our work for 2023 and bring into our day to day practice across every sector. 

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