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Digital case study
Building a customer-centric
Auckland Transport
Transforming an engineering-led organisation to provide customer focused digital solutions.
In 2016, Auckland Transport engaged PwC to develop its digital and customer strategy in order to transform the company from an engineering business into a world-class customer-centric organisation.
Client: Auckland Transport
Our Role: Over the past five years, PwC has helped Auckland Transport roll out ‘Customer Central’, an ongoing programme with a core objective to ‘build better, customer-centric digital solutions faster’.
Industry: Transportation and logistics
Services: Digital, advisory, customer service
Country: New Zealand
Client challenge
With annual operating expenditure of more than NZ$1bn ($0.71bn), Auckland Transport manages and operates all the greater Auckland metropolitan region’s transport services, apart from state highways, as well as being responsible for footpaths, cycling lanes and parking control. In total, around 100 million journeys are made each year on Auckland Transport’s transport network, including around 26 million commuting trips.
In 2016, the company was led by engineers whose prime mission was to design an efficient transport system and build and maintain high-class infrastructure. No one in senior management saw themselves as a champion for the customer, even though Auckland Transport recognised that the substantial negative feedback it received from the public about poor services was a cause for concern.
“One of PwC’s key strengths is that they have lifted our game by building on our capability, so the outcomes last longer than the initial engagement. The x-factor for us is PwC’s diversity – the team has so many hidden talents and experiences which have added extra value when Auckland Transport has called for their support and leadership.”
Approach
We proposed instead a new digital capability programme, called ‘Customer Central’, whose core objective was to ‘build better, customer-centric digital solutions faster’ by focusing on three transformative digital goals: creating dedicated, cross-functional teams working on real customer problems; establishing a clear framework for testing and validating all customer opportunities and digital solutions, and prioritising projects that delivered the right information at the right time.
Impact
So far, PwC’s team has developed eleven recommendations in partnership with Auckland Transport, which form the basis of the company’s digitalised journey towards world-class customer centricity. These recommendations range from Auckland Transport Mobile, an app used by the travelling public to track more than a million journeys per month, to digitalised support for vision-impaired passengers and customer behaviour analytics.
Auckland Transport Customer Central is now a permanent Auckland Transport department, and with the appointment of Vanessa Ellis, Executive General Manager Customer Experience, Auckland Transport has delivered more than NZ$30 mn ($21.3 mn) in measurable benefits since between 2017 and 2019 with further benefits to be calculated from major work streams including reducing travel disruption and improving the commuting experience. The division has won multiple digital awards, including winner in 2018 of the Best Digital Transformation and Best Technical Solution categories at New Zealand’s Association of Local Government Information Management awards.
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