Transforming the local government experience

Providing transformational digital solutions for clients doesn’t necessarily need to involve huge budgets, long turnaround times and complex fixes.

For our Local Government clients, it was simply a matter of providing a solution that would address an issue experienced by both customers and staff.

Access to information and data is key to being able to deliver an optimal customer experience. With hundreds of Local Government clients around Australia, one problem was universal – not being able to easily and securely access current and historical rates notices.

With continued scrutiny on operational costs from all stakeholders, and an expectation from rate payers that they can access bills of all kinds online, our cost-effective Local Government digital portal was born.

Behind the development

A concerted effort by Local Government teams across Australia to boost the rate of digital migration for rate payers, revealed considerable internal challenges including a shortage of resourcing to build their own solution or even integrate with other software providers. The team at Zipform Digital took on this challenge.

Tony Mott, Business Consultant for Local Government at Zipform Digital, explains why it makes sense to look outwards,

“Local Governments as an organisation usually don’t have the resources to build and support this kind of digital solution. It also makes good business sense to use their partners experience - in this instance Zipform Digital - to build and host it. We knew their business and all the regulatory requirements, and we were already producing their communications, so it was an easy decision for the multitude of clients who adopted it.”

With a requirement to create an historical view of all rates notices past and future generated for each Local Government by Zipform Digital, we also needed to include the following functionality:

• Easy to access for staff and be usable across other internal departments

• Secure and authenticated access for users

• Stop the use entirely of disks, USB’s and FTP to move data internally and externally

Tony said the end solution was designed to provide staff with the ability to access rate payer information quickly and easily and additional functionality has since been added to improve the user experience even more.

“Not only would the planned solution improve both the ease and level of access, but it would also create a 360-degree view of all communications sent to ratepayers. Most importantly, it had to meet the legal and regulatory archiving requirements for Local Government, which included information security.

We created a cost-effective model which doesn’t require any Local Government input, or support costs.”

The portal design

The end solution was aligned to specific needs, rather than an out of the box solution with a one size fits all approach. Input was sought from several clients to guide the design – a first for this industry that resulted in a customer-led product design. We were able to provide flexible custom solutions for clients in addition to the “base level” portal, as not all clients wanted the same solution – particularly dependent on the size and complexity of the Local Government Area.

On-demand document generation was one of the custom solutions created for a number of clients. Tony explains more about the desire for this feature,

“On-demand document generation is essentially a feature where a Local Government can select a document type within the portal, such as rates, instalments, interim notices, reminders and submit a small corresponding batch of data. Once finalised it will generate the notices and add them to the archive view. Whilst it was a complex initial build for our developers, it is extraordinarily simple for our clients to use, at odds with their prior time-consuming procedures.

“The feedback I’ve received is that of overwhelming relief, to be able to utilise staff time more efficiently.”   

Internal users within Local Government teams were able to search and view exact images sent to their customers, and also edit notices and email  directly from within the portal itself – saving significant cost, time for staff to action requests, and reducing the time that ratepayers had to wait to  receive new documents. This was ground-breaking for Local Government teams, who had operated in an environment of frustrating manual, time intensive processes.

With ratepayers now able to access their notices via the portal, useful features for them included:   

·         Ability to view documents such as rates notices or outstanding amounts

·         Pay their rates notice and other bills online

Are portals future proof?

Building a portal for the future and not just current requirements is a key component of most builds that we undertake at Zipform Digital. Tony sums up,

“We build with many future requirements included, such as scalability, information and data security updates. Whilst we build something that is best practice initially, we also ensure that the framework can be improved and updated easily in future. If we receive feedback from our Local Government clients on potential improvements and we know that everyone will benefit from this, it goes into the bank for the regular scheduled system update. It’s a great benefit for clients, as they will never have a stagnant system that becomes outdated.”