Developing a CX Masterplan for NZICC

New Zealand International Convention Centre (NZICC), a world class “place to gather, connect, and belong” and NZ’s only venue with International Convention Centre status.

Understanding why organisers choose a venue is a different question to understanding what makes them want to keep working with one, so the CX Masterplan had to start from the second question rather than repeat the first.

We built directly on the earlier Jobs to Be Done research into venue choice, synthesising what it had already established before running anything new. From there we co-facilitated workshops with a cross section of Delivery Partners, mapping the journey each group actually goes through from initial engagement to post event activity, and ran an internal service blueprinting session with the NZICC team to translate those journeys into something the organisation could deliver against. Because organisers, promoters and suppliers do not all want the same thing from a venue, we also built a behavioural customer typology and an event segmentation framework, so the masterplan could hold one coherent view of the Delivery Partner journey while still naming where each group’s needs genuinely diverge.

This approach built upon the foundational Jobs to Be Done research completed by Purple Shirt, which uncovered why event organisers might choose NZICC over competitors. Our approach involved co-facilitating customer-led workshops with diverse Delivery Partners, mapping their typical journeys from initial engagement to post-event activities. Although Purple Shirt did not attend the majority of the workshops, we quickly synthesised the available data to catch up. We then facilitated three additional workshops with Delivery Partners and an internal service blueprinting session helping the NZICC team develop the CX Masterplan. We also developed a behavioural customer typology model and an event segmentation framework, further tailoring our insights to diverse customer needs and behaviours. One of the key challenges was to articulate a unified customer journey while addressing specific differences across various groups.

NZICC came out with a CX Masterplan and accompanying service blueprints it could act on immediately and keep using well beyond opening day: a set of improvements ready for immediate implementation, and a longer term investment pipeline for initiatives that needed more lead time. Both are now the standing reference NZICC uses to keep its Delivery Partner experience deliberate rather than improvised.