Curtin University has been recognized as a WBA Winner for Digital CX Management in the World Business Awards 2019. The World Business Award for Digital CX Management [DCX] recognizes organizations that have achieved outstanding results through initiatives that demonstrate excellence in digital customer experience.

Curtin University (Curtin) in Perth, Western Australia, enjoys an international reputation for teaching excellence. Operating with a truly global focus, Curtin offers exemplary learning pathway for more than 60,000 students across six campuses in Perth, Kalgoorlie, Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai and Mauritius. Learning at Curtin is characterised by high-impact research and strong industry partnerships, and key to its success is the quality of the student digital experience.

Curtin’s Digital User Experience & Insights team (DUE&I) works with the university’s internal student audience and is part of the larger Student Lifecycle Engagement team. Under the leadership of manager, Peter van Schie, the DUE&I team is responsible for development and management of the Student Portal (OASIS) and other web applications.

When an individual enrols at Curtin – in Perth or at a remote campus – they become the customers of the DUE&I team, who focus on the improvement of the student experience across the engagement channels. In short, the DUE&I provide ease of access to all the tools, information and applications a student requires to be successful.

The DUE&I team acts as the beating heart of Curtin, successfully creating a superior digital customer experience, characterised by genuine stakeholder engagement and visionary thinking. Because the team support a great many business areas and faculties within the university – all of which rely on an easy effective flow of information to students – they liaise with all interested parties, acting as the digital conduit to the students for many of the services offered at Curtin. DUE&I’s key strengths include their accessibility, their flexibility and understanding of the separate business areas and how they fit into the bigger picture.

The Experience Management Eco-system (EME) initiative began as a strategic project which amalgamated with an existing operational unit having, as part of its remit, the digital experience for the entire student internal audience, including OASIS. In line with its Learning for Tomorrow strategic program of work, and to simplify the student experience, Curtin created a new area – Student Lifecycle Engagement – which, in turn, created the DUE&I team.

The EME initiative sought to create personalisation across a global audience. To put it into perspective, OASIS is by far the leading digital engagement platform for Curtin, handling in excess of 42 million unique page views a year, of which more than nine million is mobile traffic. Yet OASIS was only one part of the puzzle. Many other pieces operating independently outside the portal also required attention in order to get consistency across all the university’s digital channels, including Curtin’s websites, mobile apps and the service cloud customer portal, which held Curtin’s FAQs.

The EME initiative was charged with taking the many channels and platforms that interfaced with Curtin’s 60,000 students to create an improved – and most importantly, consistent – digital student experience whilst simultaneously gaining efficiencies for the university. Importantly, the creation of consistency would reduce the cognitive load students experienced when moving to a different environment. For the initiative to be successful, it was imperative that students could continue to relate to Curtin’s sites in terms of look, feel and functionality, no matter what form of access they chose. Whilst the EME initiative tailored solutions to the individual channels, its main achievement was in successfully developing maximum consistency across those channels to create optimum ease of use in the digital space.