How St John New Zealand handles 500K emergency calls a year

Setting out to create long lasting change

St John New Zealand are an independent charitable organization serving communities right across New Zealand. The organization respond to around 500,000 emergency calls each year, charting their paramount importance to the wellbeing of New Zealand's residents.

Growing pains of transitioning to a digital-first organization

Being one of the largest handlers of cheques in New Zealand, and with a range of fragmented digital experiences and a large number of customers in older demographic groups, St John were aware that their transition into a digital-first organization was not going to be an overnight transformation.

Some significant challenges included an abundance of legacy systems along with manual processing and workarounds that had led them to a digital dead-end. The team also had to contend with very limited resources and limited digital skills within the organization, causing them to miss opportunities to engage with customers and gain valuable insights from across their digital footprint. They required an intelligent platform that would aid their knowledge and help grow their marketing operations.

Proactively making customers proactive

St John soon grasped that in order to improve customer engagement with their site, they needed to reengineer their operations, with a focus on customer experience, automation, integration and digital capabilities that could be reused across their business units. This way there would be less need for their customers to call, write-in or stand in line to receive basic information or make transactions that could be delivered online, as well as providing St John with the ability to drive revenue and engagement whilst reducing operational costs and churn.

Delivering a new digital vision

Today, St John are leveraging Optimizely Commerce Cloud to help deliver their transformational digital vision. The ecommerce platform enables them to boost their commercial operations, build engaging new experiences for their customers and deliver capabilities that can be re-used across the organization. St John have been using Optimizely to transform their, legacy, non-intuitive website into a purpose-built platform dedicated to engagement. Integrating with numerous other technology stacks, they are using Optimizely Commerce Cloud to overcome some significant business challenges.

Even though St John are only at the start of their transformation journey, they are delivering transformational change for their customers and staff: Instead of taking up to four weeks to receive first aid training invoices, customers now receive documentation instantly from St John - and new self-service features are helping drive down call volumes into their customer support centre. Their Optimizely environment is a retail experience that will deliver customer engagement opportunities that are head and shoulders above their peers, and their fully-fledged ecosystem allows St John to bring the right products and services to their market quicker than they’ve ever done before.