Community consultation on Mitchell Shire Council’s Draft Customer Experience Strategy began yesterday and will continue until March 24, 2024.
The Draft Customer Experience Strategy 2024-2027 aims to redefine how council interacts with customers and the community focusing on enhancing the overall experience.
The development of the strategy is a response to the evolving expectations of the community and the need for more efficient and effective service delivery.
The consultation will be undertaken in two stages – an extensive internal consultation already completed and an extensive community consultation.
The community consultation will include online surveys, in-person pop up sessions and interaction workshops crafted to provide meaningful dialogue, gather feedback and ensure the strategy reflects community needs.
Councillor Bill Chisholm hoped the plan would optimise customer service delivery.
“We know there’s been hiccups at times through this process and hopefully this is a way of simplifying and getting the community a better result,” he said.
The strategy has four priority areas – customer insight to gain insight into customer needs, expectations and preferences; customer-centric culture to enable customer-focused mindsets and skillsets to deliver improved experiences; service optimisation to improve services and interactions; and leveraging data and technology to understand customers better for personalised experiences.
The plan provides a three-year outlook with year one focusing on foundations and groundwork, year two focusing on refining and strengthening the approach and year three working to ensure sustainability of overall performance.
Councillor Rob Eldridge said it was a great initiative.
“Data and technology integration is a really key part of this and will enable us to keep track of a lot of the things that sometimes go missing now when we respond to customer complaints,” he said.
“Hopefully we get some good response from the community on this because this is where the gravel hits the road.”
Council also adopted an updated complaints policy, with the revision undertaken in conjunction with the development of the customer experience strategy.
An amendment to the draft proposed by councillor Fiona Stevens was adopted to include internal process reviews would be completed by someone of sufficient managerial position not located/independent within the area the complaint relates to.
