Customer Experience at Oaklin helps brands and organisations understand how and why their customers interact with them. We help organisations clarify the customer journey for their existing products, design compelling customer centric journeys for new products and services, embrace customer centricity during transformation and consistently meet and even exceed their customers’ expectations.
"To thrive, businesses need to put the customer at the heart of what they do – in other words, become ‘customer centric’."
Customers are in control and their expectations keep rising. With more choice than ever in who they engage with and how, they expect personalised and consistent experiences across the entire journey. Customer experience design is now essential for any organisation that wants a competitive edge. CX is a revenue lever in its own right: when customers feel appreciated, trusted and prioritised they have better experiences stay loyal and spend more over a longer period. To maximise the commercial returns that customer centricity can deliver organisations must make customer and user experience a core part of the strategic narrative.
Oaklin’s holistic approach to Customer Experience is based on our Service Design methodology. This brings innovation into the process and helps to create and launch products and services that are truly tailored to customers, while maximising business efficiency.
Our end-to-end service design approach starts with what our clients are trying to achieve. We then work collaboratively, putting our clients’ customers at the centre of the design process and focus on the rapid delivery of value. The empathise, envision and experiment stages feature rapid iteration. We form hypotheses and constantly test them to define the overall solution blueprint and target areas to deliver this change.
The develop, deliver and scale and adopt stages can occur separately for each area of the new service. They operate with a defined target for delivery and use feedback from users in a live environment to drive agile delivery of the new service components. Activities here aim to deliver working solutions to users in the form of MVPs (minimum viable products). These activities help teams release value early and build confidence with real user feedback.
Clients work with Oaklin’s Customer Experience and Service Design experts to improve existing products services or campaigns and to launch new ones. Our tools and techniques help teams uncover real insight and embed it into design and delivery to act as living artefacts for ongoing management and optimisation.
Without a clear CX strategy, businesses risk losing customers to competitors delivering simpler, more relevant or more personalised experiences. Poor communication and missed feedback loops erode trust and loyalty, and negatively affect sentiment and customer metrics.
With Oaklin’s support clients define a clear customer value proposition rooted in what people actually need and expect. We help build repeatable habits like journey mapping and service blueprinting that become part of how the business runs. The result is better retention stronger advocacy higher revenue and leaner operations with fewer drop-offs and delays. Most importantly clients gain a customer-centric mindset that aligns teams around shared outcomes and drives sustainable growth.
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Oaklin embedded a team to lead the design and development of a direct-to-consumer, digital retail model, disrupting the traditional dealer model.
The team utilised our end-to-end service design approach to develop a future state service blueprint for the sales journey of the new 4x4 vehicle. This allowed the team to develop a prioritised roadmap of capability and functionality to be delivered based on business value, and design the business required to orchestrate the desired sales journey.
The team was trusted to support throughout the lifecycle of the programme, providing both product owner and programme management expertise. We mobilised and ran the programme and ensured product excellence by putting the customer at the heart of delivery.
Oaklin’s efforts resulted in a successful launch, and on-time delivery of “Reservation Day” which surpassed internal sales targets. Oaklin's support has continued through to launching online sales and our next target is customer deliveries.
Following an internal audit into their operating model, a large automotive manufacturer identified a significant opportunity to enhance their customer experience (CX) strategy across four of their UK operating entities. They specifically highlighted the need for a more cohesive, measured and accountable approach to CX, and Oaklin was engaged to help address these challenges to drive meaningful improvements.
Recognising that companies with superior CX outperform their competitors by 80%, and with some customer recommendation scores on the decline, Oaklin strove to instil a customer-centric culture across the entities by embedding customer journey mapping as a cultural process. The objective was to create a comprehensive, end-to-end view of the customer to drive both tactical and strategic advancements.
To achieve this, Oaklin designed a holistic customer journey mapping framework, underpinned by Service Design methodology. Standardising best practice mapping through the latest CJM software, the Oaklin team created templates, guides and training material to ensure project teams achieved outcomes that exceeded customer expectations. Oaklin also implemented an overarching governance structure to promote cross-entity collaboration, data-driven prioritisation and alignment between senior stakeholders.
To ensure this approach was fit for purpose, several Proof-of-Concept journey maps were created for high-priority, business-critical projects. These included the launch of a new finance product, the installation of electric vehicle (EV) wallboxes, and support for a customer satisfaction campaign. The design and continuous iteration of these maps kept the customer at the heart of all activity, identifying pain points and opportunities across the journeys to positively impact customer satisfaction, retention and advocacy.
A leading distributor of plumbing and building materials sought to move away from the sale of traditional carbon heating systems and prepare to be a key player in the renewables market. Achieving this would require more than a product shift, it demanded a compelling, future-proof customer proposition that could inspire loyalty among local installers and set the business apart from its competitors. Oaklin was asked to support the design, planning and Go-to-Market strategy development for a winning customer-centric proposition, with the aim of empowering local installers.
Working in close partnership with the client, we applied early-stage design thinking to shape a clear and ambitious vision for 2030, with customer-centric design at its core. From concept to launch, we supported the entire proposition lifecycle. This collaborative approach led to the successful Phase 1 delivery of a market-leading integrated service offering for the local installer – the first of its kind in the sector. We mapped the end-to-end customer journey and utilised customer insights to overlay pain-points, producing a prioritised roadmap for service delivery.
We continue to partner with the client on the development of a loyalty programme designed to deepen customer relationships, increase retention, and secure their position as a leader in the renewables market. From idea to implementation, Oaklin helped turn an ambitious vision into a market reality.
Nathan is an experienced consultant and certified customer experience (CX) professional with demonstrated delivery across digital and large-scale transformation engagements, supporting a wide range of clients. He is most driven by designing and delivering meaningful change for clients, customers and employees.
Nathan co-leads Oaklin’s Customer Experience practice and has recently led a CX strategy engagement to deliver a governance framework, process optimisation and CX best practice to embed Customer Journey Mapping as a cultural process across all 5 UK entities of a large automotive manufacturer.
Kira is an enthusiastic and motivated consultant, with strong communication skills. Following her previous experience in Financial Services, Kira has most recently focused on the Automotive sector. She is an experienced project/programme manager with an interest in large-scale transformation, automotive marketing, and innovation.
Kira co-leads Oaklin’s Customer Experience practice and is leading a Service Design strategy for a major UK materials distributor; she is ensuring every proposition is customer led and maximises the opportunities created by the Green Energy Transition.
