Innovation Case Study: Customer Experience Governance Model
Whittlesea City Council
Transforming customer experience
The City of Whittlesea’s customer success business partner model transformed the way their teams think of the customer experience and act on it. The robust customer experience governance model sits across all their services and has seen self-service increase more than 400% without sacrificing customer satisfaction.
2026 MAVlab Innovation Awards Finalist:
The Dollars and Sense Award for Impactful and Innovative Business Practices, supported by SenSen Networks.
Project Goals:
- A Customer Success Project Control Group (PCG) to oversee all customer-facing initiatives
- A Customer Success Business Partner model embedding CX expertise across all Directorates
- Customer Experience Standards and training applied consistently across 1,300 staff
- A single source of truth (Salesforce CRM and customer satisfaction survey) with real-time customer.
Project Team:
To ensure the longevity of the model, council have enabled staff to practice customer-centricity and own how each department can have an ongoing impact in the overall customer experience.
To ensure continuous improvements, council have established a dedicated Customer Success Team of 5 people, focused on enabling an enterprise approach to customer with the support of a business partner model.
Council will engage external vendors as required for specified training following the investment of any significant technology or customer enhancements.
The approach is dependent on executive sponsorship and governance, active department collaboration, and upskilling of internal staff.
Team or contributors:
- Nicole Mizzi, Unit Manager Customer Success, City of Whittlesea.
- Kate Reimers, Customer Success Officer, City of Whittlesea.
- Lauren Gill, Customer Success Officer, City of Whittlesea.
- Jay Orton, CX Business Analyst, City of Whittlesea.
- Gilbert Annese, Unit Manager Customer Service, City of Whittlesea.
Project duration:
The embedding of customer experience governance model in January 2025 has exceeded expectations through a seamless transition from the legacy CRM system to Salesforce and has established a modern, scalable, and secure platform. The model has ensured clear, strategic direction for all 147 services across Council, as well as delivered a single, consolidated view of customer service needs
Challenge and context:
The City of Whittlesea, one of Australia’s fastest growing councils, faced pressure to deliver consistent, high-quality customer experiences for a rapidly expanding and diverse community. Population growth, increasing service demand and changing community expectations exposed a fundamental challenge: customer services had evolved over time, but the way Council designed, governed and improved those services had not kept pace.
Customer interactions were fragmented across organisational silos, with different teams managing services through varied processes, systems and approaches. Legacy systems limited visibility of customer needs had prevented Council from developing a complete understanding of customer journeys. A historical compliance-driven culture meant internal processes often guided decision-making, rather than a shared focus on customer outcomes.
These challenges created inconsistency in service delivery, duplication of effort and limited ability to proactively identify emerging customer needs or barriers. Customers expected simpler, more transparent and accessible ways to interact with Council across both digital and non-digital channels, while staff needed clearer guidance, better information and stronger organisational alignment to support consistent service delivery.
The complexity of the challenge was significant. The City of Whittlesea manages 147 services across a broad range of community needs, requiring coordination across multiple teams, systems and service areas. The community is diverse, with different levels of digital confidence, accessibility needs and expectations regarding services delivery. Ensuring equitable access required Council to improve not only digital experiences, but the overall way customers engaged with services.
The challenge was not simply improving individual services, it was changing how an entire organisation understood, governed and delivered customer experiences. Any solution needed to work across all directorates, support our 1,300 employees, operate within existing resource constraints, and improve customer outcomes while maintaining service continuity.
A new, whole-of-organisation approach was required to embed customer-centricity into governance, decision-making and everyday operations.
Solution and innovation:
The City of Whittlesea implemented a Customer Experience Governance Model - a transformative, enterprise-wide approach that embeds customer-centricity into service delivery and decision-making.
Why this is innovative:
This model moves beyond traditional service improvements by fundamentally redesigning how decisions are made. It integrates:
- A Customer Success Project Control Group (PCG) to oversee all customer-facing initiatives
- A Customer Success Business Partner model embedding CX expertise across all Directorates
- Customer Experience Standards and training applied consistently across 1,300 staff
- A single source of truth (Salesforce CRM and customer satisfaction survey) with real-time customer insights.
This governance-led model ensures that customer needs—not internal priorities—drive decisions across the organisation, representing a significant shift from past practice.
Approach and delivery:
- Insight-driven discovery
Customer needs were identified through surveys, CRM data, service requests, complaints, and over 8,321 “close-the-loop” feedback surveys. These insights informed customer journey mapping and live dashboards. - Governance and decision-making reform
The Customer Success PCG was established as a cross-organisational forum to prioritise initiatives based on customer impact, ensuring transparency and accountability. - Embedding capability across the organisation
A Business Partner model connected each Directorate with CX expertise, resulting in 176 engagements that drove service improvements, automation, and communication enhancements. - Enabling technology and data integration
Salesforce was implemented as a unified CRM platform, consolidating customer interactions into a single system, enabling real-time insights and data-driven decisions. - Workforce transformation
Customer-centricity training, a CX Toolkit and CX standards equipped staff with the skills, tools and guidance needed to deliver to consistent experience across all services.
Inclusion and accessibility:
The model improves accessibility by:
- Expanding self-service options (427% increase in usage)
- Providing multi-channel access to services
- Using data insights to identify and address barriers
- Ensuring consistent, transparent, and easy-to-navigate customer journeys
This ensures equitable access for a diverse and growing community.
The model provides a scalable blueprint for embedding customer-centricity at an organisational level, with clear pathways for replication, adaptation and knowledge sharing across the local government sector.
Project impacts and short-term outcomes:
The project has delivered strong, measurable outcomes with its implementation.
The innovation was not simply the introduction of new technology or improved individual services; it was a fundamental shift in how Council identified priorities, allocated resources and measured success.
Traditionally, customer improvements were often progressed through individual service areas, creating a risk of inconsistent approaches and disconnected customer experiences.
The Customer Experience Governance Model introduced a coordinated, organisation-wide framework where customer needs and insights became the foundation for decision-making.
Customer outcomes:
- 427% increase in customer self-service uptake, improving convenience and accessibility
- Sustained customer satisfaction score of 79%
- Improved consistency and transparency in customer interactions.
Operational outcomes:
- Endorsement of 34 major customer projects, with 47% already delivered
- Reduction in manual effort through automation and improved reporting
- Increased efficiency through better service coordination and prioritisation.
Data and decision-making outcomes:
- A single consolidated view of customer data across 147 services
- Real-time dashboards enabling proactive service management
- Evidence-based prioritisation of initiatives through the Customer Success Pipeline.
Outcomes were measured using:
- Customer satisfaction surveys and close-the-loop feedback
- CRM data and service metrics (SLAs, rework rates, case volumes)
- Digital channel usage and self-service adoption
- Weekly reporting and monthly executive governance reviews.
These results demonstrate clear, attributable improvements directly linked to the project. Further, by embedding accessibility into the way services are designed and governed, the model supports equitable access for a diverse and growing community.
Capability and long-term impacts:
This project created lasting organisational capability. It changed the way council operates, not just what it delivered, by significantly strengthening Council’s long-term capability and operating model:
Organisational capability uplift:
- Embedded a customer-centric culture across 1,300 staff
- Established a dedicated Customer Success Team to sustain and evolve the model
- Built internal capability in data-driven decision-making and customer experience design.
Improved systems and governance:
- Established a scalable governance framework for all customer-facing initiatives
- Created a repeatable model for prioritisation and delivery through the Customer Success Pipeline
- Enabled consistent application of Customer Experience Standards.
Enhanced resilience and adaptability:
- Increased ability to respond to changing customer needs through real-time insights
- Strengthened cross-functional collaboration and accountability
- Improved organisational agility through better data, tools, and processes.
Continuous improvement culture:
- Embedded ongoing feedback loops, including surveys and performance monitoring
- Enabled departments to independently identify and act on improvement opportunities
- Established a sustainable model supported by governance, systems, and skilled staff.
This represents a fundamental shift in how Council designs, delivers, and continuously improves services.
Scalability and transferability:
The Customer Experience Governance Model is designed for scalability and transferability across the local government sector, providing a practical and proven framework that can be readily adopted by councils of varying size, structure and maturity.
Operating across all 147 services, the model demonstrates that enterprise-wide customer experience transformation can be achieved using existing organisational roles, systems and governance structures. This makes it inherently adaptable and accessible for replication.
The model is underpinned by a lightweight, dedicated CX function and strengthened by whole-of-organisation governance, enabling consistent application while remaining flexible enough to be tailored to local context, resources and priorities.
Transferability is supported through clear replication pathways, including:
- A governance framework that can be adopted or adapted by other councils to embed customer-centric decision-making
- Established role clarity and operating rhythms that can be mapped to existing structures in other organisations
- Shareable tools, processes and reporting approaches that support implementation without redesigning systems
- Embedded capability-building through training and change management approaches that can be replicated or locally delivered.
Key enabling conditions for successful adoption include executive leadership commitment, access to customer data and insights, investment in capability uplift, and governance structures that connect customer experience to organisational decision-making.
The model also supports broader sector improvement by shifting councils from siloed service improvements to an integrated, data-informed governance approach that strengthens efficiency, consistency and service outcomes.
Overall, the model provides a scalable blueprint for embedding customer-centricity at an organisational level, with clear pathways for replication, adaptation and knowledge sharing across the local government sector.