Case Study: Toowoomba Regional Council enhances resident services

The Toowoomba Regional Council (TRC) is revamping resident services as it creates easier pathways to raise maintenance requests, make payments and handle development applications via boosted data capabilities.

Through a mixture of in-house work and collaboration with Boomi, the Queensland regional council is aiming to become a data-focussed organisation, including a major water infrastructure refresh.

Part of its transformation work has seen the council replace the ageing infrastructure of 64,000 homes with smart meters and invest in guaranteeing waterway information lands in the correct hands.

Work was conducted via the council’s project team titled ‘CXT’ and included a three-year rollout of smart meters to all residents.

Mark Godfrey, senior integration developer at the TRC told Digital Nation the work has “now opened up a lot more options with what we can improve and offer the customer with our ratepayers.”

“This is currently being looked at to replace online forms. So, one such example was a direct debit request form, which the previous process was very time consuming, both for the customer and for our internal staff.

“They would have to navigate to the page, the page would take them through numerous inputs and then hit a point where they would be asked to download a file, manually sign that file, scan it, re-upload the file and then it would be emailed to our customer service offices,” Godfrey said.

“They would then have to triage the email, manually write it in our property rating system for that customer to create a request on their behalf and then that would shoot off to another area to action with the details.”

This process, said Godfrey, becomes “very time consuming” however, under the partnership with Boomi’s workflow platform “we're able to integrate all the pieces behind that.”

“Now a customer fills in the inputs, digitally signs online, creates a PDF and automatically generates a request directly to the operational area, completely cutting out all the customer service officers and all that manual intensive process for the customer with downloading forms.”

Godfrey explained many pain points have been resolved because of the council’s transformation efforts.

“Some of our customers weren't the most tech-savvy with knowing or even having who's got a scanner or knows how to use their iPhone or whatever to do a scanned image and then upload it.”

“That was a bit of a roadblock for a number of customers who aren't tech savvy in order to do that.

“We would have other people that would resort to a paper-based form where they'd manually fill it all out and just post it in.

“Now there's no more need to do any of that because they can do it all online easily,’ Godfrey said.

The updated platform has “generated a lot of excitement” with the team now wanting to replace “our most used online forms to do all this to save not only the customer, but our staff all that time with manual processes.”

Godfrey added the TRC is piloting other systems including Boomi’s master data hub product to help create a single view of its customers.

“Right now, our customer service offices will use over a dozen applications at any single point in a day and what our single view of the customer will ultimately be working towards achieving is pulling all that information into a single location.”

This means as soon as a customer calls, the contact centre should have a “snapshot” of information to help fast-track assistance.

The council’s smart meter project aspect was a three-year replacement project which saw a lot of time saved, according to Godfrey.

“We get to save a lot more time on manual processes as well and same with meter creation.

“That was another huge benefit that we saved. That was previously an entirely manual process where every single meter was manually created in our property and rating application.

“Now that is just a bulk setting that's just handled by Boomi and just imported.

The council’s custom app is also proving beneficial to its residents, said Godfrey as people can gain oversight of their water usage plus be notified of water leaks

 “Not that long ago, we had a pretty bad drought. We're on severe water restrictions,” Godfrey said.

“Having that technology in place is very beneficial where we can alert not only the council but the customer if they happen to have a leak and they don't know about it.”