Background 

Optus' identity verification had evolved independently across digital, retail, and contact centre channels — each with its own logic, tooling, and failure modes. The result was a fragmented service generating repeated customer friction, compliance gaps, and significant fraud exposure with no single system of record to manage against. The problem wasn't a missing feature. It was a broken service requiring end-to-end redesign across people, processes, and technology simultaneously.

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Role 

As CX Lead across all working groups — internal and external — I was accountable not just for designing the experience but for its organisational adoption. That meant owning cross-functional alignment, selling the experience vision to every team responsible for building and implementing it, and ensuring CX remained the anchor through every trade-off and technical constraint the program encountered.

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The Challenge 

Each channel had evolved in isolation — inconsistent experiences, repeated identity checks, slow interactions, and limited fallback options when verification failed. No single team had visibility of the whole system, and no single fix would be enough.

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Approach 

Discovery spanned all three channels — customer interviews, contextual observation, and end-to-end touchpoint analysis — revealing not just where customers dropped off, but why: the service wasn't communicating its own intent, and customers were filling the gap with anxiety and suspicion. SME workshops across fraud, legal, infosec, retail, and contact centre teams built a shared picture of systemic failure points no single team could see in isolation. Ecosystem mapping and edge case workshops then pressure-tested the architecture against real-world constraints: biometric failure, device limitations, low-connectivity environments, and the compliance scenarios fraud and infosec needed resolved.

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Strategic Direction 

Market analysis across fintech, digital banking, and government identity services informed the recommendation: consolidate verification into a single app-led experience triggerable from any channel, designed to the trust standards customers associated with financial services. Three principles anchored the strategy — one entry point regardless of channel, progressive disclosure to reduce cognitive load, and finance-grade trust signals that made security legible without making it intimidating.

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Service Design and Delivery 

A universal QR trigger routed into a single in-app biometric flow within My Optus App, eliminating channel-specific verification logic and establishing one system of record across the business. Fallback pathways were treated as first-class service design — not edge cases — with recovery flows for biometric failure, device limitations, and accessibility constraints designed to be viable for customers and defensible for the business. Agent and retail workflows were redesigned as part of the same service system, giving frontline teams reliable processes to replace the workarounds discovery had uncovered.

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Leading Cross-Functional Alignment 

Securing commitment required sustained leadership, not a single presentation. I served as CX lead across all working groups internally and represented CX in Mastercard's stakeholder groups externally — keeping the customer experience at the centre of decisions being made by people whose primary lens was compliance, risk, or engineering feasibility. Customer research, operational metrics, and market benchmarking were shaped into narratives tailored to each audience, with progress reported regularly to the CEO and SLT.

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Outcome 

1,000+ verifications in the first two weeks. Reduced manual identity checks across all channels. One governed service replacing three — and a cross-functional model that became the organisational template for complex, multi-channel transformation.