Designing a surprisingly simple council experience
Lane Cove Council provides a range of vital services for the people of Lower North Shore Sydney; they understand that any service is only as good as its accessibility, and that excellent customer service and clear communication is an essential part of serving their community. They came to us with a simple but critical goal: How might we make interacting with Lane Cove Council so surprisingly simple that our residents want to share their experience with their neighbours and friends?
Empathy and customer drivers
For over ten years, Proto has been continually refining our customer-centred design approach , creating a system that builds a deep understanding of customer needs and uses those insights to drive future CX improvements.
This dynamic approach to CX design is ideal for emotive subjects such as home, community and local government and would provide the core of Lane Cove Council's new CX approach.
Visualising the customer's needs
We worked hand-in-hand with Lane Cove Council, defining the project's scale and aims through fifteen Lane Cove Council stakeholder and staff interviews before reaching out to their customers through fifty resident interviews and a complete social media review.
Connecting with Lane Cove Council's customers and listening to their voice produced vital insights that we mapped into five separate customer journeys related to core services: Tree Removal Applications, Hard Rubbish Collection, Council Venue Bookings, Parking Permit Application and After Hours Assistance.
For each journey, we created a hybrid customer journey map that incorporated the current state, mapping the touchpoint, resident problem, connected emotion, supporting verbatim and key insights, alongside a reimagined future state with proposed solutions to the uncovered issues. This was delivered within a 5-week sprint to match the resources and scale of the problems.
Building a CX roadmap of actionable initiatives
Visualising both the current customer journey map and an ideal future state allowed us to create a tangible roadmap of actionable initiatives that would lead Lane Cove Council to their model customer journey through attainable short, medium and long term goals.
These scalable initiatives gave Lane Cove Council the tools they needed not only to address their customer's needs in the short-term, but to stay agile enough to address changing customer expectations in the long-term.
Evolving organisation cultures
By incepting a customer-centric culture that empowers staff, removes constraints and earns long-term customer loyalty, Lane Cove Council were able to transform themselves from a burden that slows progress into an enabler that enriches their customer's lives.
Through the use of scalable initiatives built on customer verbatim and compelling insights delivered by Proto, Lane Cove Council staff are now able to utilise every opportunity to delight and impress their community, giving the organisation a vital point of difference.
Delivering phenomenal outcomes
“Working with Proto was a leap of faith, but they have become a major strategic partner in our CX evolution. The work they've developed and the way we've been able to embed it in the organisation has been absolutely phenomenal, and we're getting the outcomes we want.”
Felicity ClarkCustomer Experience ManagerEvery week 5k+ business leaders get three pragmatic and actionable tips to help understand their customers and employees to accelerate business growth.
All issues take less than 3 minutes to read.