From File Handler to Digital Product Specialist—Keeping The Customer at the Heart of It All
At Minster Law, my career journey has evolved from being on the front lines as a Legal Advisor, to becoming a Change Agent, and now working as a Digital Product Specialist. Throughout this journey, one constant has remained: the importance of customer feedback and insights. It’s been the cornerstone of every role I’ve taken on, allowing me to grow while ensuring that the customer remains at the heart of everything we do. Here’s how my perspective on customer feedback has evolved through the roles I’ve held, and how it’s shaped my approach to improving the customer experience.
The Struggles of Gaining Actionable Feedback
One of the key lessons I’ve learned is that gathering feedback, while crucial, isn’t always straightforward. There’s a constant balancing act between quantitative and qualitative data. Do you want metric distilled feedback from 10,000 customers, or rich, actionable insights from 10 customers? It’s tempting to rely solely on large-scale metrics, but the numbers don’t always tell the full story.
Early in my career, I saw how easy it was to hide behind metrics like call volumes and average handling times. While they offer useful data, nothing compares to story-based, qualitative feedback that comes directly from speaking to customers. Having that one-on-one connection grounds you and gives you a much better understanding of the problems customers face.
This understanding guided me through each stage of my career. From handling customer complaints as a file handler to leading digital transformations as a digital product specialist, my approach to feedback has grown and matured—but my focus has never changed.
Legal Advisor: Grounded in Customer Experience
My journey began as a Legal Advisor. In this front-line role, I was dealing with customers directly, understanding their issues and frustrations firsthand. I was also the most experienced in the newly formed hub, which meant I became the go-to person for complaints—a role that forced me to confront customer pain points head-on.
This hub was part of a new team-structured way of working, and a big part of our strategy was to use customer-focused approaches. Working with our partner’s introduced me to Systems Thinking, which uses a systematic approach to review the customer journey holistically through the lens of the customer in order to create a journey that is fit to every customer. I took this opportunity to integrate systems thinking into my day-to-day workflows, placing the customer at the centre of every decision. This experience taught me that rich, qualitative feedback from direct customer interaction is irreplaceable. No metric can fully capture the frustration in a customer’s voice or the satisfaction when a solution works for them.
Key Lesson: Front-line interaction allows you to truly understand what customers are experiencing. You can feel the emotion from the customer, it’s no longer words on a page or numbers on a screen, it’s a real customer speaking to you to resolve an issue.
Change Agent: Translating Feedback into Action
In my second role as a Change Agent, I took my learnings from the front line and began integrating them into broader digital transformations. This role was a six-month secondment, during which I focused on improving our digital customer journey.
My first instinct was to go straight to the source—our customers. I called ten customers and spent as long as they needed on the phone, listening to every piece of feedback they could offer. The impact was immediate: ten pages of rich, qualitative insights that made clear the key areas for improvement. These trends would have been buried in traditional metrics, but direct conversations brought them into focus, giving us actionable direction to transform the digital experience.
From this feedback, we delivered key improvements to our medical appointment process and reporting system. We introduced video explainers, improved the accuracy of the information, and expanded content formats to make the digital experience smoother for our customers. Today, 62% of our customers respond to their medical reports online.
Additionally, we made the strategic decision to refine our online portal to cater specifically to small claims. By focusing our digital efforts on claims that benefit most from the online journey, we’ve been able to provide hyper-targeted support and improve customer outcomes significantly. Our digital portal sees 67% of users tracking their claim progress monthly.
Another significant enhancement was the introduction of a new screen to cover settlement negotiations, which we found to be a source of anxiety for many customers. We added more FAQs, a prep guide, and a video explainer to help users understand the process better. Over 3,000 FAQs are accessed monthly, and our support videos have accumulated 11 hours of watch time across the user base. Our analysis shows that users who engage with the FAQs call 27% less, showing that well-crafted self-service resources can reduce friction and customer effort in the customer experience.
On the back-end, we also deployed an operational portal manager tool, enabling our internal teams to better support customers in their digital journeys. This tool has bridged the gap between front-end developments and operational support, ensuring our teams are equipped to assist when needed and providing a reliable foundation for further innovations.
Key Lesson: When you blend qualitative insights with operational experience, the path to improving customer journeys becomes clear.
Digital Product Specialist: Evolving Feedback into Data-Driven Decisions
Today, as a Digital Product Specialist, my role has evolved again, but the importance of customer feedback remains as strong as ever. While my previous role involved fast-paced fixes, this one requires a more strategic, long-term thinking about how we can digitally transform our customer journey.
In this role, I’ve been able to use tools that track user behaviour and gather session recordings, which provide a more detailed view of how customers interact with our platform. Combined with rich customer insights, these tools allow us to make data-led decisions that align with our long-term vision.
Over the next year, I’m excited to work on several key initiatives that will enhance the customer journey and overall experience. I’ll be recruiting customers to establish digital focus groups to gather real-time feedback throughout their claims journey, ensuring we fully understand their digital experiences as they unfold. I’m also identifying a group of “hyper-users” who frequently interact with our digital portal, allowing us to monitor trends, spot pain points, and make targeted improvements.
These initiatives are underpinned by our aim to establish our digital product roadmap, primarily I’ll be using the customer-centric RIC framework to guide our focus on digital enhancements that will provide the greatest value to our customers. The RIC framework is built around three key factors:
- Reach: How many users will benefit from the enhancement?
- Impact: How significantly will it affect each user?
- Confidence: How certain are we about the Reach and Impact, and what data supports these assumptions?
Another exciting area of focus is working with teams across the business to develop a Customer Experience reporting dashboard which will involve the creation of new metrics and incorporation of existing ones. This will ensure that we are continuously measuring the holistic customer experience, improving our insights, and keeping ourselves accountable to providing an excellent journey.
Key Lesson: As your role evolves, so should your approach to feedback, but the customer should always remain the focal point.
The Constant—Keeping the Customer at the Heart
Whether I was handling calls as a Legal Advisor or mapping out our digital future as a Digital Product Specialist, the importance of customer feedback has been a constant. It’s the cornerstone of innovation and the key to delivering a service that truly meets the needs of our customers.
While metrics and data analysis are important, nothing compares to the rich, qualitative feedback you gain from speaking to customers. Listening to their stories has shaped my career and will continue to guide the direction we take at Minster Law.
No matter what your role, keeping the customer at the heart of everything you do is the best way to ensure success—for both you and the business.
