Project Overview

The ‘CityConnect’ project delivered a refreshed and enhanced online dashboard for community members to make, manage, and track their requests with the City of Sydney Council. Our unified digital ecosystem increased access to online council services from 30 to 84 online services. Accessible from a computer, tablet, and mobile phone, CityConnect provides a secure ‘one-stop-shop’ dashboard view for anyone wanting to interact with the City of Sydney digitally. The customer’s personal dashboard enables easy access to view their: current and historic requests and applications; City of Sydney allocated parking permits; City of Sydney property titles; view, pay, and set up payment arrangements for their rate payments; and property certificate purchase information. A wider suite of online services will be available in future project implementations.
CityConnect provides links to access ‘smart’ digital forms, reducing paper-based applications significantly. We delivered digital access to services that are most frequently requested by people residing, working, or visiting our local government area, such as ‘Report an issue’, where any asset needing attention can be reported. Using the smart digital forms via the CityConnect dashboard triggers activities in our new customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The workflows created by the smart digital forms ensure the teams best positioned to respond to the request or application are assigned cases and tasks in the CRM to assist us in managing the fulfillment of customer requests. CityConnect offers heightened transparency for the customer as the status of applications and requests is available on-demand through their personal dashboard.

Organisation

City of Sydney

Team

Chief Technology and Digital Services Officer – Dr Tom Gao.
IT Portfolio Delivery Manager Technology and Digital Services – Craig Buttriss.
Senior Project Manager – Rakesh Gugnani.
Product owner – Catherine Veronesi.
Digital Development Manager – Michale Peng
Technical Delivery Managers – Kaushal De Silva; Akshay Bharde
Business Analysts – Dean Purcell; Simon Buffett; Arvind Baddepudi; Cheng Zhu.
Solution Architects – Sutanto Samboen; Madhav Gorthi, Johnson Kosasih.
Senior Digital Creative – Janine Poon.
Senior Change Manager – Takeshi Hirama.
Change Analyst – Kerry McLennan.
Integration Manager – Qasim Chaudhry.
Integration Lead – Ivan Yeoh..
Test Lead – Chris Chen.
Senior Software Engineer – Andy Suwandy.

Project Brief

In 2019 a consultation was commissioned by the Council to explore the digital customer service experience with both internal and external stakeholders. Both groups described our digital experience as “broken”, “inconsistent” and “fragmented”, and criticized for being almost exclusively paper-based when making applications and requests for services. This frustrated our customers, whose expectations were to be able to transact with us online at their convenience; it frustrated our staff who we unable to have end-to-end visibility of the community member’s request fulfillment. They felt there was limited transparency with their requests, and furthermore, the research identified a gap that existed: a lack of awareness of Council services available, particularly in residents 18-34 years of age.
Our challenge was to replace the City of Sydney's outdated and fragmented online tools and deliver a simplified, connected, and omnichannel platform. Greater visibility of all services available, request/application progress, and transparency of service level agreements committed to by the Council. We need to ensure finding the relevant information for a customer meets the brief to be “simple and effortless” and “mobile friendly”. This involved introducing new smart digital forms and an integrated personalized dashboard that work together to deliver an "all in one place" digital experience for the community. The outcomes sought were to drive greater self-service among users through the adoption of digital channels, targeting to reach 60% + of customer service contacts through online channels.

Project Need

We flipped the paradigm on how people should be able to interact with Councils. Our research findings told us the public perceived Councils as a monopoly, and that customers have no choice in the organization they deal with when it comes to payment of rates or requests for permits or city services. This lack of competition was seen to lead to complacency in the online experience Councils offered to the community. Our CityConnect project has provided a customer-centric view of the services we offer, with the outcome of making our services more accessible and transparent to community members who engage with us.
The user experience when requesting a service via our new smart digital forms has been significantly uplifted and simplified. Upfront data validation partnered with complex backend integrations delivers a more personalized and streamlined experience for the customer.
For our employees, the actioning of requests is enhanced by an automated workflow that splits requests into individual tasks that are channeled directly to the relevant business area as soon as the form is submitted. City of Sydney staff record the actions taken to progress tasks in our internal CRM system, which then coordinates status updates and manages the completion of the request and notification to the customer.
The CityConnect dashboard enables customers to view all their information in one place – from rates, fees and charges payments to real-time updates on service requests, applications, and properties. All are available digitally without the need to download, print, and scan PDF forms.

User Experience

Community members interacting with the Council were exasperated by poor online services, “It’s hopeless, but it’s what I’ve come to expect with government, they don’t know their right hand from their left and it shows when you’re on any (government) website”. To really meet the needs of those who engage with the City of Sydney Council, the largest and most complex Council in Australia, we needed to ‘Do better’. We support more businesses and attract more visitors than any other Council in Australia. People interact with us because they use our services and amenities for a variety of reasons, whether it be as residents, business owners, workers, or students in the local government area, a sporting group, or wanting to host events at our parks or community centers. Regardless of the reason to interact with us, people expect an omnichannel experience when they engage.
As a Council, we have prided ourselves on continuous improvement, and our vision of ‘Green, Global, Connected’ could only be achieved through a digital transformation process. Our CityConnect, smart digital forms, and OneCRM projects created an ecosystem that embodies the City’s vision. We’ve become more customer-centric, creating a digital customer experience that centers the dashboard around information that is personalized. We’ve improved our environmental sustainability by making our requests and applications digitized and reducing the cost to serve while increasing speed to resolution by streamlining the process of internal work assignments through the smart digital forms interfacing with our CRM system.

Project Marketing

As part of the transition to CityConnect, we migrated the active accounts of community members who had previously registered for our online services. In order to complete their account migration, a password reset and acceptance of new terms and conditions were required.
To reduce the risk of customers reporting go-live marketing as a scam or phishing email, a series of targeted communications were sent. Our first EDM announced the upcoming changes and clearly outlined the process to complete their account migration on the day of going live. This was highly successful from a visibility perspective with a 47% open rate in the first 24 hours and an expectedly low click rate of 0.86%.
By the time we reached go-live day, our launch communications welcoming community members to the new experience achieved an improved open rate of 53%, with a highly effective 13.59% click rate within the first 24 hours.
In the 24 hours of proceeding live, we observed approximately 4,000 individuals successfully complete their migration and log in to the new experience.

Project Privacy

All data collected as part of the consultation process was anonymized. Research data was collected via interviews (internal and external stakeholders), call-center ‘listen-in’ sessions, a review of existing customer service guidance practice notes, and an online customer survey. Community member demographic data collected included: gender; age; employment status; English as a second language; country of birth; service user relationship to the City of Sydney Council - resident, visitor, local government area business owner. Data analytics from the usage of CityConnect is also anonymized. In our Hypercare period and beyond, we are collecting aggregated information on a number of unique user IDs accessing CityConnect; the total number of login events recorded, and the number of logins to smart digital forms.

Digital - Government Services

The provision of timely government services has been transformed as applications and sites are developed and implemented to either replace or complement previous methods. Be it the delivery of current and up to date critical information, compliance, community support and engagement, notification and registration or providing greater accessibility to government resources.
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