Australia Post

Streamlining business customer onboarding to accelerate revenue and reduce cost to serve

Role

Senior Service Designer

Responsibilities

Customer research, experience mapping across key customer segments, opportunity identification, coordination of CX activities across discovery and delivery, design sprint facilitation and collaboration with Salesforce delivery partner.

Team

Auspost internal teams (SMEs across sales, onboarding, support and operations, and Salesforce implementation partner

Australia Post's business customer onboarding spanned months: a slow, disjointed process of sales conversations, contracts and technical set-up that frustrated customers and delayed revenue for the business. The Lead to Cash project (later Customer Simplification) set out to fundamentally rethink this experience, streamlining the path from first contact to active trading.

The task

The project covered the full B2B sales and onboarding lifecycle, from initial customer contact through to hypercare and BAU, across three distinct customer segments: SMB, enterprise, and key strategic accounts. The design challenge was to:

•Map and understand current-state pain across all customer types and internal teams
•Identify experience improvements and process efficiencies that could lower cost to serve
•Design a future-state experience that made onboarding faster, simpler and more trustworthy
•Support delivery teams to implement changes within Salesforce and across frontline processes

The aims

→ Reduce customer onboarding time by streamlining qualification, proposal and technical onboarding stages, removing duplication and improving information handoffs between teams.
→ Simplify the experience for three distinct customer segments through a Deal Orchestration Framework that matched the right level of support to the complexity of each deal.
→ Improve internal collaboration between sales, onboarding and support teams, establishing clear ownership, shared SLAs and a 360° customer view in Salesforce.
→ Reduce cost to serve by shifting customers toward self-serve onboarding, AI-enabled help and better-designed support pathways.

Issues identified

→ Disconnected systems across AusPost, StarTrack and multiple Salesforce instances created a fragmented onboarding experience for both internal teams and customers, with no single source of truth.
→ The lengthy process resulted in high cost to serve, requiring many teams with unclear ownership, and significantly delayed or entirely stunted new customer revenue.
→ Fragmented processes made it hard for teams to access the knowledge they needed to serve customers well, leading to inconsistent advice and downstream rework.
→ Poor internal communication created reactive rather than proactive approaches, making it difficult to manage customer expectations at critical moments in the journey.

Approach

01 –
Alignment & planning
Engaged key stakeholders early and aligned on a human-centred, sprint-based approach, establishing shared ownership of the programme's direction across a large, multi-team environment.
02 –
Research & problem definition
Immersed in available data and conducted 1:1 interviews with business customers across SMB, enterprise and government segments, as well as internal teams across sales, onboarding and support.
03 –
Mapping of experiences
Mapped and socialised current-state experiences across key customer cohorts, surfacing 20 problem spaces that spanned both front-of-house CX and backstage operations.
04 –
Opportunity identification
Prioritised experience improvements and process efficiencies using a strategic initiative map, balancing customer impact with cost reduction and operational feasibility.
05 –
Sprint structure
Structured programme activities and teams into key value streams, enabling parallel design and delivery sprints across the six experience areas.
06 –
Design sprints
Facilitated design sprints with cross-disciplinary teams of AusPost SMEs and Salesforce specialists, translating customer and business needs into detailed solution designs.
07 –
Deal Orchestration Framework
Collaboratively defined a tiered Deal Orchestration Framework for Simple, Complex and Major deals, ensuring the right level of support and process rigour for each customer type.
08 –
Detailed implementation plan
Once delivery funding was secured, supported implementation planning across the broader team, mapping design outputs to Salesforce configuration, process changes and frontline capability uplift.

Six experiences to deliver value

The programme was organised around six distinct experience opportunities, each designed as a discrete package of work that could be scoped, prioritised and delivered independently:

•DIY team set-up & onboarding: self-serve account creation and provisioning, supported by contextualised help and comms.
•Customer self-serve & touchpoints strategy: a comprehensive customer-facing hub for reporting, tracking and service access.
•Rapid resolution for help & support: AI-enabled self-serve support content and community-sourced knowledge within a customer portal.
•My business intelligence dashboard: aggregated trading performance insights for customers and account managers alike.
•Pricing orchestration & governance: automated price tiering based on real-time freight profile and volume, simplifying renewals and DoV.
•Optimise account & service planning: standardised customer strategy processes and a centralised Salesforce repository for contact history and next-best-actions.

Impact

→ Reduced customer onboarding time by 25% through a combination of process redesign, clearer team ownership and improved information handoffs across the sales and onboarding journey.
→ Streamlined onboarding pathways for three key customer segments, with a Deal Orchestration Framework that matched process complexity to deal complexity, removing unnecessary steps for simpler accounts.
→ Enhanced frontline team processes through improved sales tooling, SMS engagement templates and collaboration frameworks, enabling teams to serve customers more consistently and confidently.
→ Improved sales visibility with a 360° customer view in Salesforce, giving account managers a complete picture of customer needs, interactions and opportunities.
→ Balanced commercial and operational needs, navigating key operational processes and safety requirements to improve cross-functional collaboration between sales, onboarding and support teams.

Streamlining business customer onboarding to accelerate revenue and reduce cost to serve

Issues identified

Approach

Six experiences to deliver value

Impact

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