Sydney’s Inner West Council (IWC) faced a challenge that many councils face: achieving high levels of engagement with their community to fully understand its diverse perspectives and needs. By adopting AskYourTeam’s Community Voice platform, IWC boosted engagement and participation rates, gaining more robust, actionable insights to prioritise the most important issues. This approach led to a more engaged and invested community, a data-driven customer experience strategy, and a significant improvement in all customer service metrics. 

Giving everyone in the community a voice 

Inner West Council understood that it was nigh on impossible to build a customer experience strategy that prioritised what was most important to the people it served, without first understanding the diverse needs of their community. They needed to engage with more of their community to get the full picture. “Community Voice facilitated a higher level of engagement by making it easier for our residents to share their views and this increase in participation helped us gather a more representative and inclusive range of feedback” says Michael Spikmans - Manager for Customer Experience and Innovation at IWC. 

A data-driven approach to understanding community needs 

“It was important for us to have a solution that not only facilitated engagement, but provided detailed analytics to help us understand community needs and priorities” says Michael. 
“Community Voice gave us a deeper understanding of our community's priorities and concerns. We were able to identify specific areas where customers felt improvements were needed. The platform highlighted key demographic trends and preferences, allowing us to tailor our customer experience strategy to better meet the needs of different community segments” he says. Ultimately, the ability to slice and dice the data enabled more effective and targeted service improvements. 

A customer experience strategy, delivering results

The implementation of Community Voice had a transformative impact. “Community Voice empowered us to create a more responsive, efficient and community focused customer experience strategy, and ultimately leading to better outcomes for both council and the community we serve” concludes Michael. 
By understanding diverse community perspectives and leveraging the detailed insights, Inner West Council was able to align their strategy and delivery plans to these needs, with impressive results. “We’ve had a strong focus on customer service and have improved remarkably across the organisation against all benchmarks” says Peter Gainsford, General Manager at IWC.