A CX conversation with Brisbane City Council
August 9, 2017
Brisbane is a great place to live, work, and relax – it’s a safe, vibrant, green and prosperous city, valued for its friendly and optimistic character and enjoyable lifestyle.
Together, we’ve achieved a lot, but there’s more to be done.
Every day, Brisbane City Council works with residents and local communities to help make our city what it is today, with a long-term vision for the future.
It’s that vision and focus that has Brisbane heading in the right direction.
Brisbane City Council is delivering congestion-busting road projects, Australia’s most modern public transport, including the Brisbane Metro, as well as the parks and vibrant, liveable communities that residents deserve – all with a strong economy and more local jobs. We’re growing our city while maintaining the character of our suburbs, planning carefully for inevitable growth and focusing development around transport options.
By delivering on a strong plan now, with a vision that looks to the future, Brisbane City Council is improving quality of life for residents while ensuring our city has the services and infrastructure to meet the needs of future generations.
Following the implementation of a successful customer experience (CX) upgrade to Brisbane City Council’s customer service centre, Councillor Matthew Bourke shares his top insights about growth improvement and meaningful customer service.
How the CX can help businesses grow
For any organisation, an omnichannel CX is key to enhancing customer engagement and delivering consistent interactions across every channel. From the accessibility of information to the responsiveness and quality of the platform – every facet of the CX needs to be robust and reliable.
For example, at Brisbane City Council, customer feedback paves the way for us to improve and transform our CX and customer service offerings.
We truly listen to customer feedback to ensure that we transform our CX in ways that will provide positive outcomes for stakeholders. By streamlining CX processes in this way, organisations can minimise rework and optimise their budget, providing meaningful, value for money to our customers.
Data is an invaluable tool in allowing organisations to realise where the best opportunities lie for enhancing their CX. All data sources should be considered to truly transform an organisation’s service delivery and CX.
A CX roadmap is an excellent guide for implementing a successful engagement strategy and working towards best-practice in the CX journey. For example, Brisbane City Council has rich data sources and has recently seen the benefits of mining data across multiple channels and interactions.
This information has given us the true human story of our CX, helping us identify strategies for improvement.
Introducing BCC’s CX Strategy Roadmap
With a 24/7 Contact Centre servicing 1.4 million residents, Brisbane City Council sees the value in listening to the many community voices asking questions and providing feedback about the city. Our current customer service focus is developing a CX Strategy Roadmap. This will guide us to implement a successful customer experience strategy and work towards delivering a best-in-class customer experience.
The roadmap will be based on our Customer Service Charter, which considers how we provide meaningful service to everyone, everywhere, every time.
Everyone
- Everyone is a customer and we all serve customers
- Customers are valued equally and individually
- Customers can speak to any Council employee and they can point them in the right direction
Everywhere
- Customers choose how they interact with Council from a range of contact methods and locations
- Wherever Council employees are, they are able and willing to assist customers
Every time
- Consistent, quality service – without exception
- Customers associate excellent customer service with Council
- Employees consider the customer in all they do
This is an organisational-wide vision for all employees, third party contractors and suppliers. It outlines the Council we want our external customers to experience and also describes how we serve each other internally.
Our Customer Focus Vision, will be achieved through realising the following six key aspirations.
- One Council
- Customer Council
- Dedicated Council
- Personalised Council
- Trusted Council
- Open Council
Digital disruption and the evolution of the CX
In a disrupted world, there is a rising expectation for services to be delivered digitally via the customer’s device of choice. Organisations need to meet the rising customer demand for a seamless digital CX, providing a personalised and engaging CX that’s accessible anywhere, anytime via multiple devices.
Today’s customers expect value for money, responsiveness and ease of access to services and information. As we progress further into the digital age, it’s critical that organisations understand their customer pain points and set new standards of service delivery, prioritising digital engagement.
In Council, our CX focus is to truly listen to our customers so that we can design services in ways that create an outstanding CX. Whether it’s delivered digitally, in person or through other channels, we are committed to understanding what our customers value most and how they want to be served. Our ongoing focus on enhancing the CX will allow us to identify our biggest opportunities and action these quickly.
By listening to our customers and delivering on a strong plan now, with a vision that looks to the future, Brisbane City Council is improving quality of life for residents while ensuring our city has the services and infrastructure to meet the needs of future generations.
Three key strategies for enhancing the CX in your organisation
- Integrate CX processes with innovative technology.
Highly integrated processes are key to building a customer-focused culture across the entire organisation. Previously, Brisbane City Council’s customer service environment was siloed, with 13 different systems. The platform we were using was becoming increasing unstable and it was difficult to find skilled resources to manage it.To solve this issue and improve our CX delivery, we partnered with Verint to implement a highly configurable and knowledgeable system, with the ability to manage, modify and improve our customer interactions. This new system enabled us respond to changing customer behaviours and expectations, driving innovation and greater efficiencies in our CX journey, as well as modernising our old and complex technology environment. - An intuitive system frees up your people for more complex tasks.
Having the right technology in place to deliver an integrated CX is one thing; you also need the right people on board to manage the change. A customer-centric, intuitive system with better reporting, reliability and ‘one view of customer’ will assist organisations in decreasing the amount of time required for training.In short, with a platform that provides real-time updates of knowledge and self-service capabilities, organisations can free up talent for addressing and solving more complex issues that require a human touch. - Don’t underestimate complexity.
When embarking on a transformational CX project, don’t underestimate the complexity of your business when you are trying to simplify it.The most time-consuming task for any organisation is defining each and every process that is completed on behalf of a customer. Focus on enabling improved customer intelligence to support business planning and decision-making, both now and in the future.