Rachel O'Loughlin
Chief Customer Officer
Stellar
Australia
Founded 22 years ago, outsourcing firm Stellar has always recognised that the customer should be at the heart of business - a philosophy that attracted Rachel O’Loughlin to the business 19 years ago. But this dedicated CX journey really started to evolve in 2018 as the company developed Stellar’s 2019 business plan.
In thinking about the future of the business and industry, it became clear to Rachel and the leadership team that the greatest opportunity for Stellar and its clients was to increase its focus, investment and commitment to CX as a strategic imperative. Therefore, the development of the business plan included its first formal holistic CX initiative led by Rachel, and focusing on lifting Stellar’s market presence, by evolving customer experience through integrated human and digital solutions.
It was during this time that Rachel was appointed as Stellar’s Global Chief Customer Officer. Now able to fully focus on CX, Rachel had clarity came about the additional areas that the organisation should invest in to further accelerate the value to customers. This included the additional objectives of creating a formal Stellar CX framework, exploring real-time customer sentiment solutions and growing its insights toolkit and methodology.
Additionally, Rachel decided a restructure was in order, creating a new role to ensure someone would be accountable for driving the strategy, leading to the appointment of a head of global delivery support, which included responsibility for building a CX practice. Meanwhile, interviews were conducted with customers and the leadership team, leading to new brand, strategy and operational metrics for 2020.
With a new organisational vision and mission in place, the CEO and executive leadership team were able to present the new strategy to the management through a roadshow, each boasting session that would break the managers down into groups to create a communication of the key messages for their people, with a competition for the best delivery of these messages.
After a review of the organisational structure, a global support team including a CX practice was created to guide the CX journey, which oversees customer insights and insight products, quality, knowledge management, people learning & development, and workforce management. Through the creation of dedicated roles within the business, measures have also been created for those roles directly linked to CX ambitions and plans to hold themselves accountable.
Stellar now operates with a company KPI dashboard, reporting against key objectives monthly in global staff huddles, with the company KPI dashboard also serving as the foundation of the bonus scheme.
Other projects include the creation and deployment of an “insights to action” training programme; the launch of “what is CX?” training for all employees; and the introduction of a CX building blocks framework into tangible go to instruction cards for staff as a resource.
All of this has translated into huge strides for the organisation. Last year, Stellar achieved its highest ever NPS result from clients, on an expanded client base, and this has in turn boosted commercial results, with Stellar achieving 100% renewal on all of its existing client relationships this year.
CX has come to be core to our business – both in strategy and in operation. Almost everything we do now is driven with this lens and focus, and it is permeating all of our language and cultural constructs. We see experience as a topic of every client meeting and performance review, and I see this as a positive. We are being held accountable whilst also leading our customers in this journey as well.
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