Murrindindi Shire Council and Shire Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Craig Lloyd today (Friday, March 23) announced the Customer First Project to make shire services more responsive to the needs of residents.
The shire previously supported a series of customer service workshops held by marketing specialist Sam Hicks in 2017, with topics then taught to local businesses including learning what customer service is.
A major focus of the project will work to improve council’s use of modern technology.
“ … New systems have evolved to gather and use data, we deployed them to help organise our work – whether that was libraries, youth services, asset management or customer requests,” Lloyd said.
“Unfortunately, a number of the systems we have adopted in recent years don’t connect to one another as well as they should. As a result, we don’t necessarily have the full picture in the one place of all of the services we are providing to individual customers.”
“Customer requests and customer feedback are not being tracked as well as they could, and we haven’t always captured every customer request in a way that ensures it is actioned quickly and efficiently.”
Murrindindi Shire’s project is hoping to resolve requests more often than currently or in the past and will begin issuing reference numbers for enquires being followed up.
“When you contact Customer Service we’re going to aim for about three-quarters of all requests being resolved there and then. Customers will be issued with reference numbers for their enquiry, making it easier for them to track or follow up on their request.
Growing demand for services as the shire’s population grows has seen council struggle to keep up with increasing demand.
“It’s a challenge for every council to keep up with growing community demand, but if we streamline processes and cut out some of the bureaucracy, we can free up more resources to deliver services that are important for everybody,” Lloyd said.
“We want to ensure that if people need to access our services – whether that is to fix a pothole, receive home care as an elderly citizen, or buy a season’s ticket for the swimming pool – they can do so as easily and smoothly as possible.
“Since starting at council I have been really impressed by the commitment, knowledge and work ethic of staff. They really want to help customers to access the services they need. We just need to ensure all our systems and processes support their efforts”.
“Our staff are members of the community too. They have a real stake in ensuring the community – and our individual customers – have good experiences when they interact with council,” Lloyd said.
Council plans to move to an online system where customers will be able to log in to enable them to track their request and get a single view of all of their interactions with Council.
Customers will still be able to contact us in person or by phone – we know that personal interaction is very important.”
“We will be rolling this Project out over coming months and we will provide updates as we go. I’d ask for your patience as we work to improve how we deliver customer service, ” Lloyd said.
Contact council to let them know what you think on (03) 5772 0333 or via an online customer feedback form at http://www.murrindindi.vic.gov.au/Contact-Us.
hows about a list of the employees and their wages maybe just the job titles and their overpaid top heavy position and salaries
What would that achieve?