Woolworths Financial Services

Business Challenge

In collaboration with IQbusiness Insights, Woolworths Financial Services has launched a bespoke community called Woolworths Financial Services DifferenceMakers, which provides dedicated customers a space to share feedback to help shape strategic decision making and product development.

To ensure customer-led journey design, this community contributes to the development of loyalty programs, brand strategy, and new products. In just 6 months, new community-driven insights have improved the product development process and increased speed to insights while reducing external research costs.

Solution

In consultation with strategic partner IQbusiness Insights, Woolworths Financial Services launched their own dedicated insight community called Woolworths Financial Services DifferenceMakers, which informs the development of new products, loyalty programs, brand values, and concept testing to ensure development and strategy are customer-led.

“We were excited to introduce and develop this program together with the Woolworths Financial Services team so they can get even closer and speak directly to consumers.  They have done great work in a short amount of time to drive impact for their business”, explains Jake Orpen, Executive Director: Commercial at IQBI. 

Insights from the community are combined with other research tactics including the overarching VoC program that tracks customer experience feedback daily and traditional research for larger strategic projects. The DifferenceMakers community is leveraged to support concept and tactical testing and further dig into the “why”, giving a window into the lives of Woolworths Financial Services customers on their financial decision making, shopping behaviors, wellness needs, and experiences with other financial brands.

Insights from the community are used across the business from sales to collections and helps inform the product development during agile production schedules.

Results

In less than 6 months, the CX team has supported the build and launch of new products and services through community research and testing. They have seen increases in the speed to deliver insights and in how feedback is actioned due to timely feedback and less reliance on outsourced research work. The resulting cost savings has been significant especially considering the real-time impact on strategic new product development and loyalty programs. Feedback trackers evaluating the collections experience have also helped to better understand customer needs and pressures leading to more care and empathy in collections communication driving CSAT scores up 3% to date.

By leveraging the Woolworths Financial Services DifferenceMakers community throughout the agile product development process, they are now able to get feedback during early stages of content testing and validation. Customer insights have supported the launch of new products such as WPet Insure and the development of other new product opportunities. The team is also using insights to shape future channels, particularly WhatsApp, and supported the Digital Payments team in building functionality that meets customer needs and market diversity. 

Lastly, with this new capability the team at IQbusiness Insights has supported the Woolworths Financial Services Customer Experience team in sharing best practices, gaining a new set of research skills, and guiding them to new opportunities for growth and learning in their respective roles.