Designing and evaluating customer experience for local government

Ensuring the strategy and goal are easy to engage with

The Customer Experience team at the City of Casey had the foundations of a great CX strategy for the council, but needed support to communicate it effectively and demonstrate how it would be practically used to improve customer experience. Clarifying and educating on common CX misconceptions gave stakeholders a grounded, aligned understanding of the purpose and application of such strategy.

Paper Giant was engaged to support the development of a publicly facing version of the strategy and a customer experience measurement framework. The goal was to make the strategy easier to engage with, to implement it and to evaluate its progress and impact.

The challenges of a complex organisation and council

The City of Casey is one of Melbourne’s fastest growing cities, with over 300,000 residents. It is also one of the most culturally diverse. This means that the teams at the City of Casey are often responding to large changes in demand while working independently to address existing problems.

Customer experience is a relatively new discipline at the City of Casey, and sits across numerous business units, who often have their own goals and objectives.

The strategy needed to be clear and focused to enable the different council units to align their streams of work easily to the strategy goals. Simultaneously, business units had to be able to measure their impact on customer satisfaction.

A collaborative approach

Paper Giant assisted the City of Casey by augmenting and working as an embedded part of their Customer Experience team.

Collaboratively, we reviewed and analysed the work that had been done on the strategy to date. Building on the existing insights, we developed a new high-level strategy and shared it first with the City of Casey Executive Leadership Team and then with the wider public.

The strategy focused on 5 key organisational competencies, the organisation’s ability to:

• Listen
• Remember
• Change
• Respond
• Inform

Once the strategy was signed off, we then began to engage the wider organisation through a series of interviews and workshops, to understand how the different units could track and measure their work and align what they do to contribute to the strategy.

Aligning business units for effective evaluation

This deep understanding of the organisation allowed us to collaborate with different business units, to help refocus their strategies and align their goals and ways of working to support ongoing measurement and continuous improvement.

Using a ‘now, next and future’ structure, we stepped out how to use both the strategy and the measurement framework to align the ways different business units can track their data – and how what they track supports improved customer experience.

The framework is accompanied by a set of key progress indicators for the strategy, tools to embed CX tracking and monitoring at every service level, and practical ways to assess and guide CX capability development and investment.

The award-winning strategy is now live

This strategy is now a publicly facing document that the council needs to deliver against. In 2020 it won the Customer Service Project of the Year for Continuous Improvement at the CSIA Australia Service Excellence Awards.

The measurement framework now being used across the organisation to support continuous improvement of customer experience within and across the different organisational units.