The document describes a human centered design practice that puts people at the center of everything, uses design thinking as its approach to problem solving, and takes a holistic view. The practice works with clients on strategic design, service design, building customer centricity, and capability building using methods like research, experimentation, and embedding solutions. Examples provided show how the practice has helped clients improve customer experiences, increase retention, and establish a design academy.
2. We seek to positively impact how people
experience their daily life and engage in the
world.
We design with and for people to create meaningful and sustainable outcomes.
We do this by melding human insight with business practicalities, and building
capability inside the business.
3. Our practice
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Our practice is founded on three mindsets which enable us to navigate complexity,
create compelling outcomes and provide differentiating and sustainable solutions for
people.
HUMAN CENTRED
We put people at the
centre of everything
we do. We seek to
deeply understand
people and their
context.
DESIGN LED
We use human centred
design as our approach
for collaboratively solving
problems, identifying
opportunities and
creating compelling
outcomes.
HOLISTIC MIND
We are strategic
thinkers. We consider
the systems,
connections,
dependencies and
relationships that
solutions need to be
sustainable.
4. We solve complex strategic problems
and create desired futures using a human
centred approach.
Our work is founded in discipline knowledge and practices of design,
systems thinking, behavioural science and organisational change.
5. Our approach
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EXPLORE
We understand the
context and problem
through research; and
through deep insight
define opportunities.
EXPERIMENT
We co-create with
people to experiment
possible solutions and
balance customer and
business needs.
EMBODY
We work with you to
deliver and
communicate the final
solution, measure the
outcome and capture
learning.
ENGAGE
We engage with the people impacted by the problem throughout the project – you, key stakeholders, customers and others
to ensure understanding, learning and alignment.
We tailor our approach based on your outcome. We use our bespoke ‘triple diamond
framework’ to identify opportunities and design meaningful and impactful solutions
for people.
6. Our services
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Service design
Service vision | Service blueprints
| Service journeys | Channel
strategy | Customer journeys
Customer centricity
Customer centric maturity
assessment | Customer centric
strategy | Mindset & culture |
Transformative change
Strategic design
Purpose and vision | Strategy |
Mindset & culture |
Organisational transformation |
Organisational design
Capability building
and coaching
Coaching | Facilitation | Training
Customer research
Human insights
7. Our services
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Strategic design
Purpose and vision | Strategy |
Mindset & culture | Organisational
transformation | Organisational
design
Service design
Service vision | Service blueprints |
Service journeys | Channel strategy |
Customer journeys
• We help you establish your
purpose, vision and strategy for
your future.
• We collaboratively design new
structures and ways of working to
enable you to create the most
valuable relationships between
your business, your people and
your customers.
• We work with you to shift
mindsets, build capability, and
embed new organisational ways of
working that are human centred
and design led.
• We create compelling customer
experiences that deliver competitive
advantage and drive customer loyalty
and advocacy.
• We help you intentionally craft the
end to end experience and delivery of
your services.
• We balance customer needs with
business practicalities. We take a
holistic approach by considering all
customer touch-points in the service
journey. This enables us to uncover
opportunities for more efficient
streamlined services, that are easier to
deliver for your people and result in
greater customer delight.
Customer centricity
Customer centric maturity
assessment | Customer centric
strategy | Mindset & culture |
Transformative change
• A truly customer-centric culture
is capable of disrupting the
market. We help you build the
mindset, culture and capacity for
customer centricity and
transformative change.
• We use our bespoke Customer
Centricity organisational
maturity assessment to
determine where you are on
your journey.
• We help you identify areas for
development, determine
strategies for growth and work
with you to build maturity and
embed change.
8. Our services
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Capability building and coaching
Coaching | Facilitation | Training
Customer research
Human insights
• We deliver a variety of Coaching services for
Executives, Leaders and their teams including Human
Centred Leadership to empower leading human
centricity in their area of the organisation, and Human
Centred Design to build design capability through
project execution.
• We offer a range of experiential and immersive
workshops and capability building services which
can be run in-house within your organisation. These
can be customised to your needs and allow you to
explore the way design could help you meet the
challenges facing your organisation.
• We are experts in facilitating purpose and vision
workshops for organisations, leaders and teams.
• We conduct qualitative research to develop deep
understanding of the behaviours, motivations and
decision making processes of people and how they
experience the world.
• We synthesise data to reveal insights, opportunities
and risks for your organisation.
• We have extensive experience in using a number of
methods and tools for customer research including
ethnography, contextual inquiry, co-creation
workshops, interview studies and diary studies
enabling us to design the most appropriate approach
to meet your needs.
9. practice in large organisations and how to grow an organisation to maturity in this
area. Since this time she has continued to build upon her research through practice,
having established a human centred design academy, enabling customer centric
organisations and delivering outcomes based on deep human insight.
Through this combination of academic and practical experience, Zaana has developed
her own unique approach and methods which will be used as the foundation of our
Human Centred Design Practice.
Dr Zaana Howard
Human Centred Design Practice Lead
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Zaana is our Human Centred Design Practice Lead, with extensive
experience in leading complex strategic and service design projects. She
specialises in enabling design led and customer centric cultures, and
developing human centred design capability.
She is one of the first people in Australia to obtain a PhD in design
thinking. Her research focused on understanding design thinking in
11. Frontline empathic customer
conversations
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Services: Customer centricity | Capability building and coaching
A leading insurance company recognised it had a significant problem with member retention. Our Practice
Lead conducted research workshops with Contact Centre staff and qualitatively analysed a number of calls in
order to understand how staff handled these calls and how they could be improved.
Insights from this research led to the hypothesis that if frontline staff increased their empathy they would be
better able to understand and respond to their needs. In turn, she hypothesised that it would increase the
retention of members calling to cancel their membership. Our Practice Lead worked with a group of eight
agents and designed and delivered three workshops focusing on understanding empathy, increasing active
listening and improving skills in crafting open questions. In addition, she provided additional coaching with
participants on request.
Agents who participated retained 4 times as many members as the control group. In addition, the use of offers
to retain members, such as discounts, decreased. In addition participants individual NPS scores increased
from an average baseline of between 8.8-9.3 points within 2 weeks of the workshop. The conversation shifted
to one often based on price to one instead of value for the customer.
Due to this success, this capability uplift project in having empathy based conversations with customers was
rolled out to all 700 frontline staff across Retail and Contact Centre channels.
12. Customer centric capability strategy and
Executive coaching
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Services: Strategic design | Capability building and coaching
This financial services company had a strategic imperative to put the customer at the forefront of how they
work. As part of this, our Practice Lead co-led a project to develop and deliver on a strategy for building
human centred and design led capability across the business.
The team worked with business leaders to determine their needs and developed a strategy. As customer
centricity exists in the behaviours, decisions and actions people make everyday the strategy focused on
individual transformation to then shift toward a customer centric culture. We were engaged to design and
deliver capability initiatives for Executives, Leadership teams and all employees.
As part of this strategy our Practice Lead co-designed the development and roll-out of an Executive Coaching
program for executive leaders to enable them to be more customer and human centric in their leadership and
way of working. 27 Executives participated in the seven month program, of which our Practice Lead coached
9. Coaching topics included empathic leadership, mindset and habits, possibility and experimentation, and
purpose.
This program transformed how the Executives and their leadership teams worked together, with participants
becoming recognised customer advocates respected across the business. In addition, many participants
experienced significant personal growth over the program which had a positive impact on their personal and
team’s work performance and extended to their personal relationships.
13. Establishing a human centred design
academy
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Services: Strategic design | Capability building and coaching
Our Practice Lead led the design, development and launch of a human centred design academy, a capability
building service offering as part of a design consultancy. The academy was designed from extensive industry
research on capability programs, insights from our Practice Lead’s PhD research and built using a human
centred design approach.
She conducted research interviews with potential participants and organisational clients to understand learner
needs from a content, structure and experience perspective. From insights the academy was designed to
develop a human centred and design led mindset through learning the toolsets of design.
Our Practice Lead led a team to design and deliver customised immersive learning experiences to build
capability to support client strategy needs and outcomes. Program topics included: embodying empathy;
understanding complexity; customer centric thinking and design; creating meaningful customer experiences;
co-designing with customers; human centred decision making; collaboration and creating high performing
teams; customer research; prototyping and testing.
Within the first year of operation, the academy generated $250K in revenue and programs were running
weekly. Many participants had significant personal as well as professional transformations within the courses
with several now leading customer centric and design led programs of work in their organisations. In addition,
the academy is now operating programs globally.
14. Understanding drivers for purchasing
insurance
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Services: Strategic design | Service design | Customer research
Our Practice Lead co-led an engagement focused on understanding customer needs, motivations and
behaviours when purchasing insurance products in order to build the ideal customer journey. The key
outcome of the project was to increase the digital conversion rate for purchase of this type of insurance.
The project started with six co-design workshops for three different products. Our Practice Lead collaborated
closely with the client project team, mentoring and building their capability in running customer workshops
and synthesising data into insights. Workshops were framed to understand the customer’s context and needs
when purchasing the insurance products and their ideal journey to purchase. There was no bias toward the
online channels in the design of the workshops. Key insights focused on the customer need for knowledge
rather than information which resulted in their confidence to purchase.
Our Practice Lead also facilitated a strategic organisational workshop to share research insights and to
co-develop an action plan with key stakeholders. Deliverables included an ideal customer journey, design
principles for delivery and an action plan as well as strategic imperatives for achieving the outcomes the client
desired.
The Client redesigned the digital experience based on customer insights and strategic actions we
recommended. This saw an immediate increase in online application by 100% and an increase in quote to buy
conversion of 64%.
15. Co-design for community inclusion
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Services: Capability building and coaching | Customer research
As part of a National Community Inclusion initiative our Practice Lead led a project working with 11 disability
service providers to build capability in co-design and coach them in leading co-design projects to increase
community inclusion in their respective organisations.
As part of the project she conducted contextual inquiry and a diary study with the service providers in order
to understand the disability context and their needs for capability in co-design. While this served to inform
the design of the capability workshops, it also role modelled human centred design for participants and built
trust and rapport.
From research insights our Practice Lead collaboratively designed and delivered a bespoke two day workshop
for participants focusing on a co-design mindset and tools for use in the field. Following this she provided
coaching support for participants by way of group coaching via video conference calls, and individual
coaching to guide participants in designing and delivering their co-design for community inclusion projects.
The service providers involved all successfully used co-design methods and tools in their community
inclusion projects. This resulted in individual transformation for the service providers, and through this many
have made significant changes within their organisations to progress co-design as a way of working. Projects
also resulted in increased empowerment, especially through decision making, and greater community
inclusion for project participants.
16. Contact us
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For more information on our HCD offering please get in touch:
Paul Martinico
Partner, Account Executive
paul.martinico@chartermason.com
+61 402 270 896
Nick Polce
Delivery Partner
nick.polce@chartermason.com
+61 407 476 561