Customer Experience and Service Design Consultancy

For over a decade Proto has been mining the untapped potential of Australian customers and businesses to design innovative outcomes that drive sustainable growth.

Challenges we solve

Business Model Innovation

We help companies to innovate their business model by developing disruptive value propositions and redesigning their underlying operating model to deliver it.

Product and Service Innovation

We show companies how to innovate across their products and services to deliver both new and unrealised value across the end-to-end customer journey.

Customer and Employee Experience

Our clients are service businesses made up of people. We use Employee Experience to not only increase staff retention and loyalty, but also inspire and empower them to deliver a vastly improved experience for customers that drives business growth.

Create the customer experience of tomorrow

The aspiration by Optus to become the most loved service brand in Australia was a large one. Ahead of a significant investment in new technology and platforms, we helped them define and develop a growth strategy that would deliver on their aspiration. We created the customer experience of tomorrow for their 5 million customers to deliver what customers valued the most and what the business needed to achieve their business outcomes.

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Inspire change using deep customer insights

In order to transform Alinta's customer service program rigorous market research of the energy eco-system was required to deliver robust consumer insights. Ethnograhic and qualitative research captured customers underlying feelings, motivations that were mined to create actionable insights that created impetus for change.

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Create an actionable roadmap of initiatives

To deliver on Gumtree's aspirations of designing an unmatched online trading experience, we needed to understand their entire customer journey to build a complete and detailed understanding of their end-to-end user experience. By helping Gumtree understand the voice of their customer using tangible and actionable roadmap their NPS increased by 15 points, increasing customer advocacy and revenue.

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Drive customer-led innovation

Westpac wanted to understand and challenge the use of multiple payment cards for banking. Using our immersive research process, we helped Westpac uncover key business and customer insights into why people carry multiple credit cards and provided solutions to revolutionise the credit card experience with one credit card that could do everything.

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Enable innovation capability to deliver growth

We helped icare live up to its name by unlocking the power of empathy and innovation workshops and training. By connecting hearts and minds we helped icare employees establish innovative ways of working to prioritise what mattered most to their customers. We left them with a sustainable methodology to design, test and build valuable interactions with their most important clients.

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Move quickly from strategy to execution

Sydney Water overhauled their entire approach to their business by moving from an infrastructure to an innovation centric culture with their customers at the heart of their business. Despite being a monopoly, we helped them redesign their end to end journey to not only be valuable to their customers, but also, despite industry constraints, significantly exceed their stated business goals.

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Delivering phenomenal outcomes

“Working with Proto was a leap of faith, but they have become a major strategic partner in our CX evolution. The work they've developed and the way we've been able to embed it in the organisation has been absolutely phenomenal, and we're getting the outcomes we want.”

Felicity Clark Customer Experience Manager

Creating empathy to deliver outstanding results

“Proto were a pleasure to work with. They were adaptive and responsive, and developed a deep empathy for both the client and their customers. The quality of their products and services was outstanding.”

Michael Storey Manager of Customer Research and Strategy at Sydney Water

Halving your customer churn

“Without the customer experience insights from the research program, we would not have been able to identify the acquisition issues that we had. Changes to the customer interactions that led up to financial protection have reduced the outflow rates by 50%.”

Felicity Rowcliff Dean Customer Centred Design Manager

Take your NPS score to the next level

“From an NPS perspective, I have gone Spinal Tap on you guys and gone to 11. I still think the work you did with us, the way you went about it and the deliverables amounted to one of the best pieces of consulting advice I've ever commissioned.”

Matthew Liebmann Former Chief Operating Officer

Enabling customer-centric design

“Over the last 18 months, we've constantly referred to the work Proto did for us when designing and developing all the improvements to the app we're making. We've found their work to be highly valuable and has resulted in significant improvements to the MyOptus App that, without their insight wouldn't have been possible.”

Lucy Turner CX Design Launch Manager

Exceptional prototyping

“The outcome of the prototyping has been exceptional and we continue to use the knowledge and expertise that Proto shared with us during their engagement. The icing on the cake for me was that Proto captured all of the insights from the customer workshops into an organisational asset that we now use as an integral part of our toolkit for training and briefing new team members.”

Sharon Nanetti Optimal Care Program Director

Prioritising what matters

“Proto's in-depth customer research helped us to uncover underlying customer needs that wouldn't have been possible without an 'outside-in' approach. The team identified the core customer problems and provided actionable insights that enabled us to remove key areas of customer friction and frustration and redesign a credit card experience like no other.”

Christian Johansson Head of Marketing, Customer Finance

Achieving a 20 point increase in NPS

“I have worked with Damian and the team at Proto for several years. In this time, they have worked collaboratively with us to build a roadmap of strategic 'outside-in' initiatives that ultimately resulted in a 20 point increase in NPS. They imparted a great deal of CX knowledge, approaches and tools that have been invaluable to the team and the business.”

Amanda O'Donnell Head of Customer Experience

Insight driven, customer centric ideas

“Proto revealed and captured a ton of insights, putting Gumtree in a position where we can take our experience from good to great!”

Coen Horrevoets Head of Product

Award-winning customer experiences

“We won the AFR Smart Investor SMILES award for Best Online Broker. This award is based on customer voting and I believe this was as a result of a clearer focus on our existing clients which you helped us to understand.”

Arnie Selvarajah Chief Executive Officer

Design that reduces cost to serve

“The Proto team demonstrated flexibility in their approach which made such a refreshing change. They took the time to coach and mentor each of us in a highly creative and energetic environment. Furthernore, they helped us exceed our customer satisfaction targets, all whilst stripping out in excess of 20% of our service costs in under 12 months. Proto helped us to stay focussed on the customer which enabled us to win in the market.”

Matthew Anderson Chief Operating Officer

Service innovation at scale

“We worked with Proto on an exciting & unprecedented challenge at Optus, to design the customer experience of the future. Damian & the team had high energy & together we operated as 'one team'. Proto worked hand in hand with us to bring the internal team up to speed, & also brought in global experts to work with us to take our deliverables to another level of quality & innovation.”

Dan Sunderland Director of Customer Experience Strategy and Planning

Actionable Customer Strategies

“Proto developed a membership strategy that addressed points of friction along our members journey, identified opportunities to improve and clarified the types of engagement that our members needed at the different stages in their career. We were impressed with the depth of insight that Proto were able to bring to the project - as well as the energy and ideas that they helped to generate.”

Sarah Prescott-Thompson General Manager Shared Services

A partnership for CX

“Working with Proto was very much a partnership. We worked hand-in-hand to put CX on the map within the organisation. The team are flexible, trustworthy and do what it takes to achieve the best outcome. If you’re looking for a quality agency, providing quality data and insights – Proto are your guys. We received over 90 initiatives from the project of which 79% have now been implemented and we are seeing the benefits flow through!”

Customer Experience Specialist

Unique Product Innovation

“Proto integrated into multiple simultaneous projects to ensure we achieved the best outcome. They brought real clarity around customer needs, the fundamental elements of our value proposition and provided a clear roadmap of where we're trying to get to. This allowed us to differentiate beyond the traditional proposition. As a result, one customer-informed initiative we developed was loanScore™. This unique innovation helps customers see how good their home loan is and evaluate their options for a better deal.”