Background

A leading Melbourne university wanted to differentiate in a competitive higher education market by improving the student experience from exploration through to alumni engagement. Despite numerous improvement programs, initiatives remained siloed and reactive — disconnected from the retention and advocacy outcomes that mattered most, and with no shared framework to guide where to invest.

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The Challenge

The university lacked a cohesive, data-driven view of the student experience. Fragmented initiatives were shaped by internal assumptions rather than evidence, and there was no mechanism to translate student insight into investment-grade decisions at leadership level.

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The Goal

Establish a rigorous baseline understanding of the student experience, identify the highest-impact opportunities, build a strategic prioritisation framework tied to institutional outcomes, and validate future-state concepts before committing significant resources.

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Role

Leading the engagement and the team I led the end-to-end delivery of the program as CX and Innovation Director — accountable for research direction, strategic outputs, and stakeholder relationships across the full engagement. I led a team of junior strategists and UX designers throughout, briefing, directing, and developing their work across research, synthesis, and design phases. Qualitative research was conducted in partnership with a specialist research agency, which I briefed, managed, and quality-assured to ensure findings met the strategic rigour the program required.

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Approach

Stakeholder management was a significant and continuous thread

Spanning faculty leaders, operational teams, and C-suite executives including the CMO. I owned those relationships end-to-end, navigating competing priorities, managing expectations through a significant shift in research findings mid-program, and maintaining executive confidence in the process during a period of organisational change.

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Discovery and journey mapping

Qualitative discovery — interviews, contextual observation, and touchpoint analysis — surfaced motivations, pain points, and systemic barriers across the full student lifecycle. Insights were synthesised into a comprehensive journey map capturing lifecycle phases, moments of truth, emotional states, and friction points. This became the shared framework that enabled stakeholders across faculties to see, for the first time, how fragmented internal processes were collectively shaping the student experience.

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Translating insight into measurable drivers

Key qualitative themes were distilled into core experience attributes — the dimensions of university life most strongly influencing satisfaction and engagement. These formed the basis of a quantitative survey measuring both importance and current performance, surfacing the largest experience gaps with statistical rigour and removing the reliance on anecdote that had shaped previous investment decisions.

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Strategic prioritisation

Survey results were analysed using an importance–satisfaction framework combined with predictive modelling, producing a four-quadrant prioritisation model that distinguished critical investment opportunities from strengths to maintain, lower-priority areas, and experiences to hold steady. NPS-based modelling then connected experience attributes directly to student advocacy and retention — translating improvements into measurable institutional value and shifting the leadership conversation from general enhancement to investment-grade decision-making.

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From insight to action

Opportunity mapping and cross-functional workshops moved the organisation from evidence to alignment — building a shared future-state vision and establishing the strategic principles to guide transformation. Solution concepts were developed and validated with students against desirability, feasibility, and strategic fit, de-risking the roadmap before significant resources were committed.

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Outcome

A data-driven five-year transformation roadmap backed by a prioritisation framework linking experience improvements directly to retention, satisfaction, and advocacy outcomes. Leadership aligned around a shared evidence base for the first time — replacing siloed assumptions with a governed approach to CX investment.

Concept validation with students de-risked key decisions before commitment. And lasting internal CX measurement capability was built — leaving the client team equipped to continue improving and tracking student experience independently long after the engagement wrapped.

The engagement also developed the junior designers and strategists I led throughout the program — building their capability in research rigour, strategic synthesis, and stakeholder communication alongside the client organisation's own.

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The broader impact

the engagement demonstrated that student experience transformation isn't achieved through more initiatives. It's achieved through better decisions — and that the most valuable thing a research and strategy engagement can deliver is the organisational clarity to know where to act first.