Building on Strong Foundations: Wannon Water’s Customer Experience Strategy Mid-Point Review
Client: Wannon Water
Wannon Water is a regional water authority providing water and wastewater services to communities across South West Victoria. The organisation plays an essential role in supporting regional communities, businesses, and economic development while maintaining a strong focus on service reliability, sustainability, and customer experience. In 2023, the organisation launched its Customer Experience (CX) Strategy 2023–2028, establishing a clear direction for strengthening customer-centred service delivery across the organisation. As the strategy approached its midpoint, Wannon Water partnered with Change Playbook to undertake a structured review of progress and identify priorities that would support the next phase of delivering the strategy.
Challenge:
Since launching its CX Strategy, Wannon Water has made meaningful progress in strengthening customer experience across the organisation. As the strategy reached the halfway point of its lifecycle, the organisation saw an opportunity to step back and reflect on progress to ensure the strategy continued to deliver strong outcomes for both customers and the business.
This stage represented a natural transition point in the strategy lifecycle – moving from early implementation toward embedding, integrating, and scaling customer experience practices across the organisation.
The review sought to provide a clear view of progress to date, reflect on how CX capability had developed across the organisation, and identify practical priorities to sustain momentum through to 2028. It was also intended to support broader organisational planning, including helping inform thinking for the next pricing submission period.
Approach:
Change Playbook partnered with Wannon Water to undertake a structured mid-point review of the CX Strategy, combining organisational insight with practical CX strategy experience.
The review began with a discovery phase designed to understand how the strategy was being interpreted, experienced, and delivered across the organisation.
This included:
Document and insight review Reviewing the CX Strategy, governance materials, and related artefacts alongside analysis of customer experience performance data and insight sources.
Stakeholder engagement Interviews and focus groups with leaders and staff from across the organisation to explore how customer experience was being embedded into day-to-day operations and decision-making.
Validation and alignment A collaborative validation workshop to test emerging insights, confirm findings, and refine the future direction of the strategy.
Building on these discovery insights, Change Playbook revisited the maturity baseline established during the development of the CX Strategy to reflect on progress and identify opportunities to strengthen capability and consistency across the organisation.
The review also explored the capabilities required to sustain customer outcomes beyond the current strategy horizon. This informed a set of future CX directions, alongside guiding principles designed to focus effort on what matters most for the remainder of the strategy period.
These elements were brought together through the development of a three-year implementation roadmap, aligning existing strategy priorities with the future direction for customer experience.
Outcome:
The CX Strategy Mid-Point Review provided Wannon Water with a clear and consolidated view of progress since the launch of the Customer Experience Strategy.
Change Playbook delivered a comprehensive review report that brought together organisational insights, staff perspectives, and analysis of existing information to support the next phase of strategy delivery.
The engagement delivered:
- A consolidated view of progress across the CX Strategy and its focus areas
- Insights into organisational capability and opportunities to strengthen delivery over time
- A set of guiding principles to support consistent customer-centred decision-making
- A practical three-year roadmap outlining priority actions to support delivery of the strategy through to 2028
The review also provided an important evidence base to support future organisational planning and investment decisions, including helping inform thinking for the next pricing submission period.
Together, these outcomes provide Wannon Water with a clear pathway to build on the strong foundations already established while continuing to strengthen customer outcomes and advance customer-centric maturity over the remainder of the strategy period.