Award-winning CX Leader Tina Morrell shares valuable insights from a career spanning brands such as The NRMA, CBA, NBN and Qantas.
What has changed, and what’s remained the same in the CX world, over the last few years?
What’s remained the same for as long as I can remember is talking about customers. How we convey this has evolved, such as keeping the customer at the centre, customer-centricity or customer obsession. Being customer-centric has always been there in some way or another. I was fortunate that my first job was working for an organisation that believed you win by keeping the customer first. At Optus, we were all given the book the “Moments of Truth” based on the Scandinavian Airline Group, which believed that every interaction you have with a customer matters.
I think this philosophy hasn’t changed but now we have a name for it: CX.
What has changed are playbooks, frameworks, terminology, methods, and the shift to Digital CX as a key channel or moment of truth. This has also shifted the way we design and develop a great customer experience to using agile ways of working. We’ve shifted from Customer Centred Design to Human Centred Design to Design Thinking, using Agile in particular for the digital experience (DX) and continued testing with customers throughout the iteration and innovation process. We’ve also focused on customer journeys to ensure every interaction or moment of truth is considered. This has evolved into taking these key touchpoints in the journey to even structuring our organisations around them into Chapters and Tribes or Crews with Practice Leads.
Across the different roles you’ve held, what have you found the most valuable KPIs to track?
I’m always intrigued when people criticise NPS (Net Promoter Score), as I think it’s a key measure. It asks someone whether they’d recommend your brand to someone, whether they’d advocate for you. Personally, I always ask someone whether they recommend the book they read, or the hotel they stayed in. This is the exact measure that all brands should be looking at and is a great way to unite a cross-section of areas within one organisation around one key metric that each area can influence. As much as this is an important measure, the gold is not just the NPS score itself, but the verbatim that sits underneath it. Which is why having a strong VOC Platform, with tools like text analytics and AI, is critical. This helps to determine the drivers of (NPS) detraction and promoters that help the organisation improve.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) at key touchpoints in the customer journey is also a critical measure and helps individual areas, such as the Contact Centre or Digital, with added information on how satisfied customers were with that channel.
Another key metric is complaints. I see complaints as a leading indicator so you need to be tracking complaints reasonably quickly as this will tell you whether there is an emerging problem before it becomes systemic. As much as many companies test their products and experiences, sometimes things don’t go as expected, so complaints will provide this view.
Finally, there are always the overarching revenue measures that I believe provide the weight we need to understand whether a CX initiative has delivered the expected impact. What is happening over time is also crucial – are we growing customers, what churn do we have, and Customer Lifetime Value (are our customers more or less profitable to us over time).
So even in CX, when we’re developing a new proposition or product or a new customer experience, we need to know whether what we’re doing is continuing to deliver value to customers. One of my favourite podcasts (Strategy Skills) summed it up perfectly. There are four key measures we need to focus on to know whether we are delivering value:
- How many customers do you have?
- How much are they spending?
- How frequently are they spending it?
- How many customers am I losing?
What are the key pillars defining a customer-centric business?
It has to start at the top. If an organisation is going to be truly customer-centric, it needs to be felt right throughout the organisation including at CEO level. Then living this means having a real VOC program that includes ongoing listening to customers at every level, walking the floor and experiencing how customers experience the brand. This also means having a Customer/Human-centred innovation framework where customers and employees are at the centre when designing and developing new products, services, experiences and propositions, and testing with customers at many touchpoints including marketing campaigns/eDMs, TVCs and comms.
The other key pillar is to measure and corral everyone to a key measure, such as NPS, and share the data and insights.
Which businesses in Australia do you believe embody a customer-centric approach?
This is probably going to tell you a bit about me, and also that we remember face-to-face more than digital experiences because they are memorable. I think Mecca in-store is truly customer-centric. From the time you walk in the store, the way you are greeted, to the layout of the store, the relevant products and the “I am here to help you” mentality from providing samples to allowing me to change a product if it didn’t work for me is memorable.
I also love some of the local bookstores that have experts behind the counter who know their products. I was buying some gifts and the person knew the best cookbook, to the best young adult fiction to the latest best crime novel. Being knowledgeable is key. And one of my local coffee shops is truly customer-centric. They know my name, my coffee, they greet me, they bring my dog his water and treats and remember his name, they make it personal. Again, making it memorable.
And the last one, I do love my Spotify App for the reason that it has added value. It started with Music, it now has Podcasts and I love the Audiobooks all in one central app.
Which specific technologies do you believe Customer leaders should be looking at in 2025?
There are many and it does depend on what you’re trying to achieve. My view is that you need a VOC platform to manage customer surveys and feedback but that it can also democratise the data to the whole organisation. In order to drive NPS, people need to know how they are going, what is their measure and how they can affect it and improve it. So key features need to include employee apps and real time dashboards, text analytics, the ability to control the data and surveys yourself, case manage so staff can close the loop, and even advanced analytics and AI. One thing I’m passionate about is how these platforms extend to integrate all VOC inputs beyond customer surveys, for example, can you add complaints, calls, online chats, social media sentiment, emotion and product reviews. I think this is still evolving towards how organisations can integrate and unify their VOC into their tech stack, including Data platforms, to be able to deliver deeper insights to drive faster action.
Journey analytics software, such as Adobe and Google Analytics, is key to understand what is happening at each digital touchpoint. And Conversational AI and knowledge management using AI to enable frontline employees are becoming critical in delivering a great experience.
There are other technologies that Customer leaders need to influence departments on, that sit alongside them that impact the customer experience. This includes Marketing, where the CRM/CDP impacts how an organisation delivers personalisation, marketing automation, and customer engagement. Other departments include Data & Analytics where the technology selected for the Data platform, for example, Google Cloud Platform, impacts the reach or depth of insights that then help drive the customer experience.
Leveraging AI in design and research is also becoming key in how to speed the process or minimise time-consuming activities. Look at how existing design tools are evolving in AI e.g. Dovetail, Figma and Miro.
A Customer Leader needs to think about how to be as data-driven as possible to deliver a more personalised experience, and how to leverage AI, machine learning and automation when delivering an omnichannel experience.
What do you regard as your biggest single “CX achievement”?
I’d highlight two! The first was developing a new membership proposition at The NRMA, which was to drive two key areas: value and relevance to members. This became the largest digital transformation at the time, redesigning the mynrma app and website. It also transformed the way we worked to use a human-centred design approach when developing new propositions and initiatives. This included using observational research upfront, discovery workshops with staff and customers, to continued testing with customers, from digital UX to marketing comms and TVCs. So really keeping the customer at the centre.
The second one was at CBA when I was managing the CommSec Cash Management product. Together with the Senior Product Manager in my team, I developed the strategy to shift from a standalone platform to the Core Banking platform to provide a superior customer experience for customers where they could do all their banking in one place ie NetBank. This was not only the right thing to do for customers, but also the benefits to the business made it a huge achievement.
