ANZ enterprises turn to AI for customer and employee insights

Doing more with less at Fonterra

This idea of doing more at a lower cost and acting as a strategic partner to the C-suite was echoed by Tomasz Soluch, future insights solutions and partnership manager at New Zealand dairy cooperative Fonterra. “The business wanted to have more answers, more insights, more often,” he said.

Because this was not possible using traditional agency-led research, Fonterra built an automated research engine using Qualtrics and supporting tools. Some teams use this platform on a self-service basis, though the traditional “do it for me” approach remains available for those requiring hands-on support.

“We saved around NZ$1m, and around 30% in costs and time per project,” Soluch said. Teams in Oceania, Southeast Asia, China and the US are now running research projects within three to seven days. This achievement was recently recognised with an Esomar global award for excellence in AI and automation in market research.

To improve the reuse of existing insights and reduce unnecessary repetition, the team created Insight Farm, a repository providing easy access to previous work.

Instead of seeing moments in isolation, we can now see how things connect, where friction starts, where it builds, and where it turns into a cost

While the repository helped employees find what they were looking for, it didn’t necessarily help them answer specific questions, noted Tim Opie, general manager of front-end innovation and insights at Fonterra. As such, an AI-powered tool called DeepSights was built on top of Insight Farm to answer queries, generate summary reports and extract contextual data.

Now, instead of emailing questions to the insights team, employees are opting for self-service. “Insight Farm unlocked our time” by handling 200 questions a month on its own, Soluch added.

Another part of the insights team’s role is looking to the future by identifying emerging signals – not only from customer research, but from the wider world of science, technology and the company’s value chain. A custom-built Foresight tool does exactly that.

Opie showed how a beta version of the software spotted growing interest in proactive ageing and longevity, identifying that the digestibility of small-molecule proteins (which can be delivered in milk products) could represent a commercial opportunity. The AI even suggested possible products, such as a “premium evening ritual mousse”. Such ideas can be stored in a database and automatically surfaced when market signals suggest the timing is right.

With AI, the primary function of Fonterra’s insights team has shifted from project-managing outside agencies to focusing on overarching strategy and delivering business outcomes, Soluch said.

Connecting the customer journey at Swyftx

Elsewhere, crypto exchange Swyftx previously struggled to identify emerging patterns across various types of customer feedback before they impacted the business, according to its head of customer insights and automation, Siân Howatson. Because no single department had a complete view of the customer, “even when our teams were doing the right thing, patterns were really hard to spot”, she said.

To resolve this, Swyftx used Qualtrics to consolidate signals from 13 different feedback channels. “That’s given us something that we’ve never had before: a journey-level view of customer experience,” Howatson explained. “Instead of seeing moments in isolation, we can now see how things connect, where friction starts, where it builds and where it turns into a cost.”

However, insight has no value unless it drives action. Swyftx’s Luma (Listen, Understand, Measure, Act) system connects these signals and analyses them through the lenses of revenue, cost, retention and risk. “Our goal is to make decisions, not just create more dashboards,” she added.

Once an issue is identified, the team’s task is to find the smallest change that would improve matters, implement it and validate the results. For example, Swyftx spotted that a meaningful number of new customers were completing the verification process but failing to make their first trade within seven days. Broader data revealed the core problem: they simply did not know where to start. By adding a basic “what to do next” message to the onboarding process, the first-trade metric improved significantly and early support calls dropped.

While the core insights team consists of just 1.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff, they are assisted by a group of 12 “Luma Legends” drawn from across the business – including engineering, marketing and customer support – who help interpret signals and identify appropriate operational changes.

Swyftx also uses AI to identify top themes within customer feedback and has deployed an AI support agent capable of handling low-complexity, low-emotion enquiries, freeing up human support teams to deal with more complex issues.

The company’s ultimate goal is to provide a proactive customer experience, anticipating needs rather than waiting for customers to ask for help. Howatson sees agentic AI playing a key role in achieving this, noting that one of the company’s guiding principles is: “Don’t automate around friction; remove it.”

Howatson offered three tips for IT and CX leaders working in this area: 

• Start with business value, not just measurement: Look for the smallest meaningful change you can make that will quickly demonstrate value.
• Consolidate existing feedback: Most organisations already have enough customer feedback, but it needs to be brought together. You don’t need to consolidate everything at once – start small, show the value and iterate.
• Use AI to accelerate insights: AI can make support more scalable and drive business value, but ensure you do not let the technology mask underlying structural problems.

Empowering employee experience at CommBank

While Qualtrics is highly visible in customer experience and market research, the supplier is increasingly serving the employee experience (EX) market.

Perhaps its most prominent ANZ customer in the EX space is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CommBank). Matthew Hull, CommBank’s executive manager of culture and people experience insights, explained how the bank’s “listening and acting” experiments over the past three years have coincided with staff turnover falling from 14.8% to 8.4%. Employee engagement scores have remained close to the 90th percentile of Qualtrics’ global benchmarks, and CommBank recently achieved the highest-ever retail NPS score for a major Australian bank.

Most organisations do not have a listening problem, but they do have an action problem. “They are drowning in data and listening without acting leads to the erosion of trust among employees,” Hull observed. “So, how do we act on what we already know?”

Hull suggested that listening and acting should be embedded directly into the flow of work. “HR has always owned listening,” he said, but if business leaders and individual teams own the listening, they are far more likely to own the subsequent actions.

To achieve this, CommBank has adopted a model of team-led listening, where anyone can initiate a survey, suggest questions and dictate the timing. The team subsequently receives an insight report and is encouraged to use it in their daily workflows, such as during daily stand-ups or sprint planning meetings.

Behind the scenes, AI tools have helped accelerate pattern identification and comment analysis. This is critical for CommBank, whose annual employee survey yields upwards of 100,000 unique comments. A Qualtrics AI-powered feature that automatically generates follow-up questions during surveys has yielded significantly richer comments, while AI is also used to deliver tailored engagement insights to leaders at various levels of the business. 

“None of this replaces human judgement,” Hull noted, adding that all AI deployments are strictly managed within the bank’s frameworks for privacy and data governance. “It all goes back to trust.”

While AI helps surface workplace issues faster, it remains up to human leaders to take the appropriate action, he concluded.