Customer centricity and local government: reality or wishful thinking?
Richard Vaughan, General Manager at Zipform Digital, offers a unique perspective on the reality of local government back-end operations across Australia and their journey towards a fully customer centric environment.
By its nature local government is very much a community-based organisation, but more recently we have seen the focus on the end customer – the ratepayer – improve through greater focus on the transactional experience. With rates notices being the single most important transactional communication that a local government sends, it is encouraging to see this evolution towards customer centricity.
The “back office” – a beating heart
Zipform Digital’s core business is handling complex customer communications on behalf of our clients around Australia. For our revenue management clients within local governments, that involves the creation and distribution of their rates notices. Every single day over the past 30 plus years we have been operating, we have sent out thousands of rates notices across Australia on their behalf. This gives us a comprehensive understanding of the unique challenges encountered.
With most of our local government clients considering the creation and distribution of rates notices a “back-office function”, the process to generate and send notices has been invisible to the rate payer. This lack of public visibility has subsequently come with a gradual reduction in focus by the business (plus reduced financial investment) as more high-profile projects gain traction. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a compromised customer experience in comparison to other Zipform Digital customers, such as Energy Retail.
Some may ask why local governments should bother focusing on a back-office system that isn’t broken, after all, people are paying their rates and revenue is coming in. I can answer that quite simply.
When that back-office function stops working – and we have seen this happen quite often in recent years with the aging technology that many local councils have in place – revenue is affected. Payment rates decline. Customer experience declines. The ability to deliver those high-profile projects are perhaps compromised financially. Only then does the back-office function come to the forefront and become very visible. And only then does it receive the attention it should have received. There is still a long road ahead for many.
Budget considerations
Someone recently asked me whether I believed that councils/local government have sufficient budget available to create a seamless and integrated customer experience.
I personally think the budget is there for some but not for all. It really depends on what other significant projects that the council has on within that same timeframe, and their prioritisation process.
The more relevant issue that can impact the budget requirement for a move towards customer centricity is collaboration within other local government departments and information sharing.
We’ve observed councils in regional Australia have the hardest challenge to update and streamline services due to budget pressures. Less ratepayers, less revenue. To overcome this, I’ve seen some regional council areas in Victoria work together to achieve common goals for shared resourcing and tendering, to minimise costs for all. This is a trend that continues to grow, especially with the ongoing financial pressures of COVID-19 and is likely to happen in other states across Australia.
The pressure to integrate
The financial hurdles to integrate legacy systems in some local governments and councils are significant. I mentioned earlier that often there are competing priorities for projects, and being “invisible” to ratepayers, I often see the modernisation of the back-office process pushed to the side in favour of more visible projects.
This is where solutions provided by Zipform Digital to our local government clients are important, such as API integrations, third party hosted customer facing portals and creating a simple experience for customers to migrate to lower cost channels and self-serve. They don’t need to integrate their systems for this to happen, meaning they have created an enriched customer experience without the significant financial investment. It’s a viable alternative for many.
The end game
Our stats tell me that local government is certainly behind other industries in terms of their migration to lower cost channels – for example paper to digital transition. Primarily this is attributed to the low number of instances they transact with customers (annually) but also because they are less motivated to make this happen. The invisible “back-office” impact.
Looking to energy retailers as an example, every touch point with a customer is always an opportunity to migrate them away from paper. Their call centre and operations people are trained and rewarded on how many customers are migrated. I firmly believe that local government staff should also have this focus, from the front reception desk and ranger services to planning and infrastructure.
Always focus on the end goal, what you want to achieve and keep that front and centre from a decision-making process. In all cases it should be what does the customer want? What is best for the customer? Putting the customer at the centre of all decisions. That is the very definition of a modern council.
Creating a back-office function that is 100% customer centric is something that should be available to every local government in Australia – and with the right partner it doesn’t need a significant financial investment. The modern council has partners who help them with this process, provide advice and offer process improvements along the way.
Richard Vaughan is General Manager at Zipform Digital.
With more than 20 years’ experience in the customer communications industry, he has a thorough understanding of the latest trends and innovations in local government, which are reflected in the customer centric solutions designed and delivered by Zipform Digital.
Connect with Richard on Linkedin.