Riverina council tech upgrade to deliver for community

Edward River Council (ERC) in New South Wales’s Riverina region is delivering a better customer experience and working more efficiently behind the scenes thanks to a technology upgrade from Australia’s TechnologyOne.

In mid-2022 the council released Edward River 2050, its community strategy plan for 2022–2050, which identified priorities and aspirations for the future, including a goal to use technology to better connect stakeholders and solve community challenges.

ERC, established in 2016, is one of the youngest in the country and serves a rural community of 8454 people, including the town of Deniliquin and the smaller villages of Blighty, Booroorban, Conargo, Mayrung, Pretty Pine and Wanganella.

With a staff of 117 to cover an area of 8884 km², efficiency was always going to be a goal.

“We’d previously set a goal of delivering excellent customer service and to better do this, we asked the community. Through periodic phone surveys we conducted, we found we were doing reasonably well with a 73% approval rating in 2021, but there was room for improvement,” said Phil Stone, ERC’s chief executive officer.

“For the new plan we raised the bar for ourselves. We wanted to address and action 95%  of customer service requests within 24 hours. To do that, we needed a tech solution that would support us now and into the future,” he said.

The council, a TechnologyOne customer since 2013 (as the former Deniliquin Council), chose to add the company’s Request Management module to its existing OneCouncil solution, allowing it to deliver a better experience for stakeholders without council staff having to learn a new application.

OneCouncil delivers finance, supply chain, human resource planning, asset management, customer experience, payroll, regulatory and revenue in one solution.

“The beauty of the new solution is that it integrates seamlessly with the rest of the TechnologyOne system we use. We are not adding a new application that we’ll have to learn how to use and manage into the future; it’s all part of the one solution,” Stone said.

ERC has created a new customer service portal that allows anyone, anywhere to lodge a request with any internet-connected device at any time and the request is now automatically directed to where it needs to go.

“Previously, each request received, whether online, phone or in-person at a council office, would have generated multiple emails within the organisation, creating an unnecessary overhead in terms of time, cost and attention,” Stone said.

“Now, because we have a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, we can automate request workflows and get up-to-date progress on a request in real time without asking someone to stop what they’re doing and write up a report.

“The bottom line is we’re getting things done quicker and more efficiently, which means happier customers, and staff,” he said.

Since launching the request module over 1200 requests have been received by council, which allows council staff to quickly find answers using key word searches and has improved the customer experience with email and SMS notifications on the status of their requests.

This new system has also improved management’s overview by consolidating the request into a single system. This means managers are now able to see all completed requests compared to outstanding requests via dashboards, as well as using mapping tools to show heat maps of requests, which assists with identifying larger problems.

Image credit: iStock.com/putilich