Manningham Council is using technology as a catalyst for change in its drive to become a higher performing and more contemporary organisation, delivering services that meet the community’s needs, expectations and preferences.

Manningham Council CEO, Warwick Winn said a recent review of customer service and customer engagement at Manningham highlighted that the current decentralised approach to customer service needs to be replaced with a centralised service model.

“The need to deliver high quality services that meet our community’s expectations has never been higher. To achieve that, Manningham needed a vision for a more contemporary, connected and customer focussed organisation.”

With little investment in the organisation’s IT environment over the last ten years, and with an outdated customer service model, Council’s Citizen Connect program will deliver a much needed transformation which puts the customer/citizen at the centre of operations and thinking, bringing significant benefits, including:

Offering customers a single point of contact for multiple services and first call resolution

• Increased accountability for service delivery and performance monitoring
• Increased speed with which calls are answered
• The development of a Knowledge Base with staff having readily accessible, standardised information, processes and customer solutions
• Providing a centralised portal where customers can easily submit and track service requests, submit an application, or pay an account from anywhere, at any time, and on any device
• Providing customers with easier access to information relevant to their immediate neighbourhood and to improve the methods by which they report local incidents.

Citizen Connect will be supported by the implementation of a new contact centre, a knowledge base system and an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) system. These will build on the series of IT Transformation projects underway and also planned for the next few years, including on-line payments, telephony upgrade, online planning applications - viewing and lodgement, event management system, event booking system and data cleansing and warehousing.

“It is really all about putting the customer at the centre of everything we do and we are focussed on enabling them to interact with us in real time and giving them the choice of how they connect with us.”

“These will be some of the most exciting and transformational initiatives undertaken at Manningham in decades,” Mr Winn said.