Making CX a business system, not a touchpoint exercise

Telcos everywhere face the same squeeze: rising customer expectations, digital-first competitors and mounting service complexity. The recurring gap is not awareness but capability. Leaders needed to understand CX as a business system connected to growth, cost and resilience rather than a surface-level touchpoint exercise, and their organisations needed the standing capability to act on that understanding.

At Belong, an Australian telco, Garry built the UX and service design capability from the ground up, first as a consultant and then appointed directly as Senior Service Designer, developing OKRs, personas, service blueprints and journey maps that put customer evidence inside product, architecture and business decisions, and coaching multidisciplinary teams in facilitation and human-centred practice.

Via Arthur D. Little, he co-designed and delivered stc's Business Mastery: Customer Experience course for senior-leader cohorts at Saudi Arabia's leading telecommunications provider, spanning liquid expectations, journey mapping and personas, employee empowerment, customer-centric culture, personalisation, omnichannel service and AI-enabled support. For Telekom Srbija he authored and presented The Value of CX, a leadership narrative connecting customer experience to organic growth, market resilience and cost efficiency, and introducing total experience thinking and the practical ingredients of a customer-centric culture.

A further engagement for Telstra extended the same discipline to national scale: designing and aligning a connectivity roadmap for the hardest-to-reach 8% of Australia's population, reconciling technical, commercial and customer needs into one plan.

Leaders across three telcos left better equipped to connect customer perspective, innovation and business metrics. At Belong the capability itself became the outcome: a standing service design function embedded in decision-making, built to outlast any single project or product cycle.