MCB is a dispersed team working across four continents to market ‘Team Melbourne’, nurture leads and develop winning bids for business events. A well-oiled machine with dedicated business development, marketing, partnerships and events functions, audience understanding was fragmented and there was no central visibility of critical processes and how consistent experiences were created. To address this, the approach focused on a mix of internal and external engagement activities to build shared understanding, create alignment and mature thinking around the customer experience, including user interviews, usability testing as well as stakeholder interviews, workshops, mapping sessions and a competitor analysis deep-dive.

Working in partnership with MCB’s market research partner, we helped inform qualitative research with certain customer cohorts, while delivering supplementary research on additional audience cohorts focused on understanding digital engagement, usability and partnership opportunities. Drawing on the combined research, to assist MCB better conceptualise its audience cohorts, distinct archetypes were defined and multi-audience customer journey maps developed to illustrate overlaps and differences between key cohorts. Crucially, this allowed the marketing and sales cycles, decision-making processes and critical channel touchpoints to be captured for the first time, highlighting clear opportunities for external customer engagement and internal process improvements. To illustrate the complex workflow of teams across four continents, a service blueprint was also developed to illustrate the end-to-end and cyclical events acquisition process and how the various teams relied on each other. These artefacts were structured as part of a broader customer experience framework, capturing for the first time a clear customer experience vision and clear understanding of audiences and experiences to align and guide strategic and tactical marketing and sales efforts across channels.

To support the organisation with immediate quick wins identified through customer research and usability testing, website usability uplift recommendations were also documented and a prototype developed to support the implementation of key changes across particular website sections. Longer term opportunities were captured in a more detailed recommendations report, including considerations around potential systems, digital optimisation and additional partnership opportunities.