Project Overview

The ‘CityConnect Ecosystem’ 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. 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 historical requests and applications; City of Sydney allocated parking permits; and City of Sydney property titles; view, pay, and set up payment arrangements for rate payments. Expansion of available services has been requested due to performance metrics showing a marked improvement in our performance and customer satisfaction.

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 that 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 fulfilment of customer requests. CityConnect offers heightened transparency as the status of applications and requests is available on demand through their personal dashboard.

Organisation

City of Sydney Council

Team

Akshay Bharde - Senior Developer
Ally Tregaskis - Systems and Improvement Manager
Andy Suwandy - Senior Software Engineer
Arvind Baddepudi Business Analyst
Catherine Veronesi Customer Service Manager
Cheng Zhu Business Analyst
Chris Chen Senior Test Lead
Chris Cui - Senior Software Engineer
Cooper Li - Technical Services Specialist
Craig Buttriss - IT Portfolio Delivery Manager
Dean Purcell Senior Business Analyst
Dr Tom Gao - Chief Technology and Digital Services Officer
Ivan Yeoh Integration Lead
Janine Poon Senior Digital Creative
Joel Lum - Technical Delivery Manager
Johnson Kosasih - Senior Technical Lead
Kaushal De Silva - Technical Delivery Manager
Kerry McLennan Change Analyst
Madhav Gorthi - Technical Lead
Michael Peng - Digital Development Manager
Qasim Chaudhry - Senior Developer
Rakesh Gugnani - Senior Project Manager
Simon Buffett - Business Analyst
Sinisa Guzina - Digital Technical Lead
Sutanto Samboen - Digital Technical Lead
Takeshi Hirama - Senior Change Manager

Project Brief

In 2019 City of Sydney Council commissioned an exploration of the digital customer service experience with both internal and external stakeholders. Both cohorts described our digital experience as “broken”, “inconsistent” and “fragmented”, and were critical of the lack of innovation and for being almost exclusively paper-based for service requests and applications. Community members stated they should be able to transact with us online at their convenience, like almost every other service organisation at that time. They revealed limited transparency with their requests and the necessity to call repeatedly for status updates (1/3 of all cases). Furthermore, the research identified a gap that existed: a lack of awareness of Council services available, particularly among residents 18-34 years of age. Internally, staff did not have visibility of the community member’s request through to finish.

Our challenge was to replace the City of Sydney's outdated and fragmented online tools and deliver a simplified, connected, and omnichannel platform. Enabling greater visibility of all available services and transparency of request/application progression. We needed to ensure that finding the relevant information for a customer met the brief to be “simple and effortless” and “mobile-friendly”. This involved introducing new smart digital forms and an integrated personalised 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 by online channels.

Project Need

We flipped the paradigm regarding people’s digital interactions with government. Our 2019 research exposed the public perceived councils as a monopoly: “It’s not like we have a choice – there’s no alternative”. This lack of competition resulted in beliefs of complacency when government organisations approached the digital customer experience. Our CityConnect ecosystem 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.

Our new smart digital forms have significantly uplifted and simplified the user experience when requesting services online. Upfront data validation, partnered with complex backend integrations, delivers a more personalised and streamlined experience for the customer. Notifications are issued immediately using the customer’s defined preference.

The smart forms ensure work is channelled directly to the relevant business area as soon as the form is submitted. For our employees, this automated workflow creates a case and tasks in our new internal CRM system, ensuring requests are managed by the appropriate team(s). Staff record the actions taken to progress tasks in the CRM. The ecosystem ensures the coordination of status updates to the customer account on their personal dashboard. Non-registered ‘Guests’ can opt in for SMS/email notifications.

In the first 12 months after its launch in April 2024, customers have submitted over 330,000 requests and 84,000 financial transactions using smart digital forms. At an estimated savings of 5 minutes per transaction, this translates to a savings of 22 full-time staff per year.

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 centres. 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 centres the dashboard around information that is personalised. We’ve improved our environmental sustainability by making our requests and applications digitised 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 was 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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