Manningham Council lifts community experience, primes for extra innovation

Manningham Council in Melbourne’s North East is where the city meets the country – it serves a diverse community of around 130,000 residents and ratepayers.

As part of a cloud based digital modernisation program, the Council has deployed Dynamics 365 to serve both as a lens, delivering clarity about the needs of the community and a catalyst, for enhanced employee and community experiences through ongoing innovation.

The modernisation is already bearing fruit; citizens can use Manningham’s Snap Send Solve app to take and submit a photo of something that needs Council attention, prompting a workflow on the back end.

Reporting has also been transformed – instead of a council employee spending all day every day developing monthly reports that just revealed bald volumes of activity, Dynamics 365 and Power BI combine to deliver much richer reports in just four hours, that cover six separate channels with data updated every night.

Sasha Lord is Manningham Council’s Manager of Citizen Connect.  She says that each day Council receives about 1000 citizen communications, approx. 300 of these are recorded in Dynamics 365. – Dynamics 365 provides complete transparency about each and every one. In the past there was no easy way to understand what customers were requesting, how well Council was responding, or if it was meeting service level agreements.

“Now all of that’s been opened up to us,” says Lord.

Citizen at the heart

Implementing a modern CRM was identified as a critical element in Manningham Council’s plan to put the citizen at the heart of everything it does. Dynamics 365 was selected as the best platform.

While there were some delays associated with Melbourne’s lengthy COVID-related lockdowns, the Council, working with Microsoft partner Fusion5, is now live with Dynamics 365 CRM and also exploring additional modules.

According to Lord; “We’re going through our first phase of implementation and I think the community will start to see some really exciting benefits in our second phase. What I’m seeing already is efficiency for our people – it’s so much easier for our teams to manage our customer requests. From entering customer feedback in to Dynamics 365 to following its journey and then looking at integration opportunities.”

Aware that its 550 employees were already facing challenges associated with rolling lockdowns, Manningham Council crafted a comprehensive change management program to ensure people were able to use Dynamics 365 as soon as it went live.

A team of 30 super users who undertook early training were able to support other users as they started to learn about the platform, with Microsoft Teams providing always-on support to new users. Lord adds; “Our CEO also ran a session on our new CRM. He hosted the session, and we just threw the floor open for people to ask questions and they did. And they weren’t backwards in coming forward. It definitely kept the lines of communication open and really engaged our users.”

As employees have moved across to the new system much more data has been collected meaning that reporting has also been significantly upgraded with a granular report available for executives that show all the metrics about Council’s response to telephone calls, to in-person requests, to live chat, email, online forms and digital communications “I can give them almost a 360 view of how our customers are engaging with us. And that’s helping data driven decision making when it comes to improving our customers’ experience and measuring our organisation’s KPIs,” says Lord.

“That’s all built within Power BI now and the organisation’s really relished the opportunity to have more accurate information coming their way, so much so that we’re building bespoke dashboards for different areas all of the time. We’re doing some work with our HR teams and  helping our grants team to set up a new dashboard based on businesses that are in CRM.

“It has really expanded Manningham’s possibilities,” says Lord. And there’s more to come.

Priyanka Morjaria, is Manningham Council’s Project Manager, and says that Dynamics 365 is now established as the foundation for ongoing innovation and workflow automation to drive extra efficiency.

“We’re currently working on Dynamics 365 Field Service for our Infrastructure & City Projects service unit. Manningham has different maintenance management systems – but they are silos,” and many still involve manual, paper-based processes.

“The plan is to digitise with Field Service and integrate with our asset management system. We will introduce mobility for our field staff to streamline our operations, reduce data duplication and moreover, improve our customer experience.

It’s a clear example of how the right modern digital platform can provide a clear runway delivering efficiency, enhanced experiences and encouraging ongoing innovation.