City of Stirling reduces costs and responds faster to citizen’s needs

City of Stirling

“With Salesforce as our platform for engagement, we can digitise and streamline the customer experience and make it consistent across all our services.”

Meriel Pickering | Manager of Customer and Communications, City of Stirling

40%

reduction in time taken to process phone and email enquiries

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City of Stirling reduces costs and responds faster to citizen’s needs

The City of Stirling is one of the most highly populated areas of Western Australia with more than 220,000 people living within its 30 suburbs. The city provides a range of services and programs to support the community, such as management of parking and waste services and administration of business and animal permits.

To streamline delivery of these services and keep the community running smoothly, the City of Stirling has embarked on a digital transformation journey, spanning all customer touchpoints. Underpinned by Salesforce, the transformation has resulted in significant efficiencies in managing common concerns like wandering dogs and parking offences as well as tasks like pet registration. The transformation has also helped to create a more customer focused culture.

A need for faster answers

Leading up to this transformation, the City of Stirlings’ contact centre employees were overwhelmed and finding it difficult to keep up with call volumes. One of the issues was the effort it took to resolve customer inquiries; employees spent too much time navigating through multiple systems and following up on requests to different departments.

Meriel Pickering, Manager of Customer and Communications for the City of Stirling, explained, “On the one side, we had angry customers who were waiting too long for answers and on the other side, we had frustrated employees who were questioning their ability to provide value.”

These frustrations were indicative of a larger need to transform service and respond faster to customer needs. To provide a foundation for this, the city needed a new CRM that would integrate with its ERP to provide a 360-degree customer view. “We chose to move forward with Salesforce after seeing what had been achieved by customers in other cities. It was beyond my expectations,” said Pickering.

Digitising service

To prove the value of the investment, the city worked with implementation partner Deloitte to carry out a pilot focused on using Service Cloud to digitise management of abandoned vehicles. The pilot was a success and resulted in a new process which enables customers to report abandoned vehicles online, using GPS mapping to provide a precise location. The report is then managed in Salesforce, ultimately resulting in the vehicle’s removal.

The City of Stirling has calculated that the digital process is 37% more efficient to manage and will save the council more than $70,000 per year. What’s more, it is just one of 36 processes that the city has digitised since the beginning of 2019. Other streamlined processes include the management of dog wandering and dog attacks. It’s not only easier for customers to report these issues, but rangers can manage the cases right on their phone. Quantified savings to date are more than $329,795 per year as a result of time saved on these processes and others.

As part of its transformation, the City of Stirling has also given customers the ability to track their inquiries online. So they can check the status of an abandoned vehicle or wandering dog without contacting the city. And when customers do get in touch, the contact centre is able to provide faster support, aided by Salesforce Knowledge articles and a single customer view. This includes a direct link to property records held in the TechnologyOne Property and Rates system.

For example, the time it takes to process an email or web-form enquiry and transfer this to the correct business unit has been reduced by 40% while the time it takes to process multi-inquiry responses has been reduced by 33%. This adds up to an overall time savings of 619 hours per year.

The city has also increased the efficiency of handling phone calls, with year-on-year (YoY) results for Q4 showing a 24% reduction in average hold time, a 14% reduction in average talk time, and an 11% increase in first contact resolution. This is despite a 7% increase in average daily calls.

The contact centre can also track and manage follow up to ensure customers receive a timely response. The city has similarly used Salesforce to help councilors manage inquiries from their constituents. The councillors can simply log onto a portal and quickly see what needs to be actioned rather than managing this all in spreadsheets.

Supporting the community through crisis

The efficiencies achieved leading up to the beginning of COVID-19 have helped the City of Stirling respond quickly to the needs of the community. Like most other organisations, the city has supported employees to work from home and, by using Salesforce, they have been able to answer calls to the contact centre remotely.

The city has also reshaped the role of rangers and sent them out into the community to ensure adherence to social distancing guidelines. New workflows were quickly set up within Salesforce to help rangers take on this role and manage cases of non-compliance right from their phone using the Salesforce mobile app.

The City of Stirling has also used Salesforce to digitise the approval process for small businesses wanting to open new outlets in the city. “We recognised the impact COVID-19 has had on small business owners and want to be sure that when they are ready to recover and open business here, we can make it as easy as possible,” said Pickering.

To support existing businesses in the area, the City of Stirling has developed an online Address and Applications Assistant which improves the speed and simplicity with which businesses can research what they can do to develop their property or business. This saves them from needing to contact the city and allows them to find out upfront what applications they will need to submit before starting their project.

Shifting focus to customer engagement

Pickering shared that change is hard for the city just like in any big organisation, but the COVID-19 crisis has helped to embed a more agile approach to change. “Everyone’s embraced a can-do attitude which is helping us to innovate in how we deliver our services,” said Pickering.

The City of Stirling is now working to leverage Salesforce as a platform for engagement, and create more seamless experiences for the community. As part of this, the city has started to use Social Studio to listen and understand sentiment across its social media channels. Next, it plans to extend its use of Social Studio to identify and proactively respond to customer issues and complaints. The City of Stirling is also using Datorama, providing it with a real-time view of community engagement across its digital channels, including social media, search, and email campaigns. This is saving 312 hours per year, equivalent to $15,800 in staff time.

A new arts and events portal has also been launched by the city. Built using both Service Cloud and Community Cloud, the portal allows customers to apply online to host events. The online process has replaced a 26 page application form and reduced the time to assess applications by 66%. Next, the City of Stirling wants to provide customers with a single sign-on point where they can manage all their interactions with the city—whether it be renewing a library book or managing their membership at the leisure centres.

“With Salesforce as our platform for engagement, we can digitise and streamline the customer experience and make it consistent across all our services,” said Pickering.

All of this innovation is being led with the help of employees who are committed to resolving internal pain points and delivering a better customer experience. This includes Carl Stobie who has left behind his role as a city ranger to become a Salesforce Ranger. Using the skills he’s learned on Trailhead, Stobie now manages the configuration of Salesforce to deliver on new use cases for the city.

"Through Trailhead, I began to visualise and understand how Salesforce could be moulded to solve complex workflows and achieve massive efficiencies in service. I was hooked and the more I learned, the more I wanted to keep learning,” said Stobie. “I'm now a Salesforce Configuration Analyst and have received overwhelming support from the City of Stirling to make this change in my career. The Salesforce Community has been fantastic and supportive as well and it is great to now be able to share our lessons learned."