The Australian State of New South Wales (NSW) managed a combination of old and new IT systems and established a highly mobile head office to deliver an average customer satisfaction score of 99% with the help of Microsoft. Service NSW’s CIO, Jacqui McPherson shares how they achieved this.
The State Government set up Service NSW to provide an integrated interface, including online, storefront and call centre, for residents and business to transact with the government. Service NSW employed Microsoft to help deliver its service centres across the state and overhaul its head office.
NSW worked with Microsoft to strengthen its IT infrastructure before service centres were rolled out. Service NSW has a combination of existing government IT systems and new systems, with certain IT components being used across agencies. Microsoft identified key IT risks, and identified appropriate mitigations. Being a government agency, Service NSW has “significant responsibilities” for security, compliance and reliability of their solutions, said McPherson. “We wanted to ensure our technology solution and roadmap were strategically aligned to these objectives,” she added.
One of the reasons for selecting Microsoft was that it gave Service NSW access to a pool of IT resources with relevant expertise and skills, McPherson highlighted. “Access to greater depth and breadth of IT skills” along with cost-effective “on-demand sourcing” led Service NSW to choose Microsoft as a strategic alliance partner, she added.
Besides strengthening IT, Microsoft also transformed Service NSW’s head office to support more collaborative and mobile work, moving from a desktop-based environment to using tablets and cloud platforms.
McPherson noted that bring your own device (BYOD) and mobility are “quite important for us because we have a highly mobile head office, and have a requirement to monitor and respond to customers and social media out of business hours”. While Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet allows the Service NSW team to work on-the-go, the cloud-based Office 365 platform allows the flexibility of BYOD and working beyond traditional office hours.
“The ability to work from home and out of hours provides a big productivity boost,” McPherson explained. “It’s especially important for our IT operation support team to cover extended Service Centre hours so we can respond effectively to any production incidents or queries, and also to plan and manage change.” In addition, real-time communication has increased efficiencies by limiting the time employees spend in meetings and increasing the time spent helping customers.
Service NSW has been a great success. Efficiencies gained from IT risk management, mobile devices and a cloud-based collaboration platform allow staff to focus on what’s important – their customers. Residents’ feedback on the new Service NSW project has been very positive. “We’re getting customer satisfaction scores of 4.8 out of 5, or an average of 99 percent, through the call centre and our service centres,” McPherson noted.
Report: Medha Basu
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