6 minute read
SERVICE DELIVERY INITIATIVE
Initiatives that demonstrate best practice, or the pursuit of excellence, in the delivery of a service to the community or a specified target market, that is able to be continued on an ongoing basis.
Judging Criteria
Advertisement
➢ Clarity of demonstrated outcomes of the initiative ➢ Benefits of initiative relative to cost ➢ Innovativeness and defining features ➢ Sustainability / transferability of the initiative ➢ Initiative’s ability to meet specific needs of clients / target groups
Winner
Finalists
➢ Kingston City Council, ChatBot 24/7 Customer Service ➢ Whittlesea City Council, Prioritising What’s Important
WINNER Service Delivery Initiative
Brimbank is a diverse and growing community, home to many children and families, some who require support to access services including pre school.
Council developed a Pre School Engagement Strategy to ensure all children benefit from a pre school education. The strategy has resulted in:
• More reserved and utilised pre school places for high needs children
• Successful pre school enrolment of more than 900 high priority children from their two week MCH Key Age/Stage visit
• Capacity to track vulnerable children who haven’t attended an MCH Key Ages/Stages visit or registered for pre school
• A user friendly centralised pre school registration portal available 24/7.
The central objective of the Pre School Engagement Strategy is that families and children, particularly vulnerable children, are supported to access pre school. All children should benefit from the advantages of attending pre school which include improved social skills, better school performance, fewer behavioural issues and engagement in lifelong learning.
The outcomes of implementing the strategy include:
• An Early Years’ Service Navigator which supports access of children to pre school, resulting in more filled Early Start pre school places for three year olds with high needs
• Reserving pre school spaces for vulnerable and newly arrived families and children saw 240 spaces held for vulnerable children in 2018 • A centralised pre school registration portal for parents. Uptake has grown significantly from 185 parents using the portal in 2016 to 2,404 in 2019
• A Maternal/Child Health (MCH) pre school link activated at the two week Key Age/Stage visit if the parent wishes to register for pre school. Analysis of data tracking children from the link in 2014 (birth-year) showed the strategy was effective in linking 926 high priority children to pre school enrolment in 2018.
The strategy includes a centralised registration process which analyses registration data for future planning, supports independent pre school programs by offering funded places, provides timely registration updates to participating pre schools, ensures continuous improvement and enables families to make and manage their own appointments when it suits them.
The Early Years’ Service Navigator role was the first of its kind in the north west region and in Local Governments in the MAV Kindergarten Enrolment Working Group. The navigation role is a particularly significant component of the strategy. Service Navigator could be utilised in many different areas in Council to inform, assist and support the community.
Council wants to ensure that all children in Brimbank have access to a high quality pre school education. The Pre School Engagement Strategy is helping to ensure they are well on the way to achieving the goal of more children, particularly vulnerable children, reaping the benefits of pre school.
FINALISTS Service Delivery Initiative
Historically, access to a Council out-of-business-hours was limited to emergencies. However, in a changing world, the expectations of a tech savvy community are increasing and customers expect access to information and services at a time that best suits them.
Kingston City Council’s objective was to provide a new, innovative channel where the community could communicate with them, find information and complete basic tasks at their leisure. To address this, Council leveraged artificial intelligence to develop a website Chatbot to act as a 24/7 concierge for the community.
The Chatbot has become an integral part of the team, quickly earning the nickname Ceebs (short for Chatbot) which is the website’s first point of contact for customers. When the Chatbot was launched it was hoped that it would be able to answer variations of 50 core questions but within two months this increased to an active list of 120 common questions and it has since grown to around 180 questions and is still going strong.
Prior to Ceebs, Kingston’s highest volume of live chat interactions (handled by humans) in a year was 6,500. The goal was for Ceebs to answer a similar volume of questions, but in the last nine months it answered 13,603 questions from 9,621 unique users with 78% accuracy.
Providing a seamless experience to customers was important, so Ceebs was designed to work hand-in-hand with the live chat client that the Customer Care Contact Centre uses. This ensures that Ceebs’ conversations can be passed smoothly from the Chatbot to a live agent if needed.
Ceebs is now the Kingston community’s 24/7 ticket to Council providing access to information and services when it best suits them.
As a large growth area Council on Melbourne’s northern fringe, Whittlesea City Council is exposed to all the complex challenges faced with managing growth, including but not limited to timely infrastructure and services, traffic congestion, strained and limited public transport, access to jobs, social isolation, as well as critical health and emergency services. Many of these key services and infrastructure items require consideration under a statutory planning permit process.
The Council’s response to help address these challenges was to implement the Priority Development Assessment Process (PDAP) which was created to focus on projects and developments that generate employment, improve community wellbeing, focus on the environment, provide critical infrastructure and housing, as well as drive investment in key locations. The Council also developed a Fast Lane planning assessment process to enable future residents to build their homes and move into their developing communities without experiencing delays from the planning permit process.
Through these streamlined planning permit application processes Council has achieved the following outcomes:
• Prioritised and facilitated planning permit applications which achieve an overall net community benefit for existing and future residents
• Enhanced working relationships between internal and external stakeholders through clear, consistent and transparent planning advice
• One of the highest performing growth area, interface and metropolitan planning functions, issuing close to 80% of all decisions within statutory timeframes and achieving a median of 55 processing days which is almost half that of the growth area average and 30% better than the metropolitan average.
Energise and Elevate your customer service in 2020
