Sydney Water Customer Experience Transformation Story | From Good to Great in CX Leadership

Overview

Across highly regulated essential services, organisations face increasing complexity in balancing customer expectations, regulatory obligations, operational pressures, and the needs of communities. 

For many utilities, delivering great customer experiences is not simply about improving processes or meeting service standards — it requires creating a shared belief that customer experience can be understood, improved and owned by every team member. 

Sydney Water faced a common challenge experienced by many large service organisations: strong foundations, capable teams, but a customer experience performance plateau that made the next level of improvement difficult to achieve. The opportunity was to move beyond measurement and embed CX as a practical, everyday capability. 

A structured approach to CX transformation

Sydney Water partnered with CSBA to understand the barriers preventing further CX improvement and to create a practical pathway to go from good to great. 

Building on a long-standing partnership and CSBA’s independent CX benchmarking capability, the transformation focused on three critical areas: 

Building belief and alignment
Helping leaders and teams understand the “why” behind CX and connecting customer experience outcomes to business impact. Delivered tailored CX workshops, leadership sessions and practical examples that connected customer experience principles and measures to everyday decisions, demonstrating how improved customer outcomes contribute to business performance, trust and organisational success. 

Simplifying CX into everyday behaviours
Turning CX measures into practical, coachable behaviours that teams could understand, apply and influence. Conducted regular calibration sessions where teams listened to customer interactions together, discussed each CX behaviour, understood how to apply it correctly, and translated CX measures into practical actions for day-to-day conversations. 

Embedding capability and ownership
Creating a culture where teams felt responsible for CX outcomes, rather than viewing them as simply a score or compliance measure. Established regular work-in-progress sessions to collaboratively identify focus areas, review opportunities for improvement, and agree on actions to uplift CX performance, creating shared ownership across teams. 

The approach recognised that sustainable CX improvement comes when people understand how their actions directly influence customer confidence, trust and satisfaction.

The biggest shift was mindset 

The transformation was not driven by a new process alone; it began with changing the way teams viewed customer experience.

Making CX simple, practical and consistent

A key element of the transformation was introducing an initiative they called “Fresh Sandwiches”. This simple behavioural approach focused on creating consistently positive customer interactions. 

The principle was:

Start Strong + Finish Strong

• A strong opening builds trust, confidence and connection.  
• A strong close creates clarity, reassurance and confidence in next steps.

These behaviours were embedded through team recognition, coaching activities, challenges and initiatives, that helped teams take real ownership of CX improvement. 

Proven impact and outcomes

The transformation delivered measurable improvements across customer, operational and employee outcomes. 

Sydney Water achieved: 

• CX Score: 65 → 84  
• CX Ranking: 4th → 1st
• Customer Satisfaction: Up +14 – with a peak score of 87
• First Call Resolution: Introduced post-call surveys that delivered 16,000+ customer responses in one month and an FCR of 85
• Employee Engagement: 68 → 86
• Attrition: 40% → 27%

The organisation moved from a performance plateau to CX leadership, demonstrating that when teams believe CX can be improved, measurable change follows.  

Continuing the CX Journey

Building on this success, Sydney Water is now expanding the approach beyond the Contact Centre to create a more consistent customer experience across customer-facing teams. 

CSBA is supporting the next phase through the design of a Unified Quality Assurance Framework. This includes creating consistent standards, improved visibility and continued CX uplift across the organisation, including teams supporting vulnerable customers and customers experiencing complex needs.

If your organisation is looking to move beyond CX measurement and embed customer-centred behaviours that deliver measurable outcomes, CSBA can help design a practical approach tailored to your teams.