New ways of working to drive product innovation

If someone offers you a free coffee next time you’re at the post office, don’t be alarmed. The coffee – or perhaps a voucher – is a penny for your thoughts. Australia Post wants to know what’s bothering its customers and how it can make their lives easier through digital innovation.

“It’s part of what we call user-centred design methodology, which puts the customer and user at the centre of everything we do,” Australia Post’s General Manager Trusted Solutions Centre, Carl Rigoni, says. This means listening to the real challenges of real customers and using these insights to drive development of new digital products and services.

Start with asking the customer

Here’s an example of how Australia Post’s new approach works. Can you remember the last time you moved house or office and what a pain it was notifying everyone of your new address? Imagine if you could notify your bank, insurers, utilities providers and many other organisations with just a few clicks of your mouse.

In late 2015, Australia Post asked customers at several post offices for their thoughts on change of address notification (COAN). The overwhelming feedback was that people were extremely busy when they moved house and the notification process was a time-consuming irritant.

Brainstorm it, test it, take it to market

Within days, an Australia Post team started brainstorming ideas on how COAN could be made quicker and easier through an online digital product. More feedback from customers showed that people preferred to log in as a guest rather than having to create a profile; the main organisations they wanted to notify were energy companies, telcos (phone and internet providers), insurance companies, banks and the government; and their preferred method of confirming their identity was Medicare or driver’s licence details, or an SMS alert.

6 tips for digital product innovation

  1. Cross-functional teams: group a range of skillsets into each team, including project managers, software developers, designers, marketers and sales reps.
  2. Co-location: keep all your expertise in one place so staff can collaborate quickly.
  3. Capacity funding: fund projects fully from the start, so teams don’t have to waste time presenting a new business case for each component.
  4. User on board: keep your customer front and centre, try early designs on a test market, respond to feedback.
  5. Constant iteration: continually improve your product until your customers are happy.
  6. Get a minimal product to market: test your first workable platform and act quickly on feedback.

Armed with these insights, the Australia Post team designed a digital solution on paper, showed it to another 30 or so customers for more feedback, then started developing it properly. They built a clickable prototype, then gathered more feedback from customers about which buttons they would need and how easy it was to use.

In January, Australia Post’s digital COAN product was launched in Queensland as a test market, and it will soon launch Australia-wide. The final version has just three steps: type in the old and new address; choose the companies you want to notify; then prove your identity. It’s easy and quick and has taken Australia Post just six months to develop.

All about agility

The COAN project highlights the huge transformation in Australia Post over the past couple of years. As its legacy core business of letter delivery fades, the organisation has fundamentally changed the way it works to embrace an agile approach to product development that puts the customer at the c