The City of Unley in Adelaide is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and attaining sky-high customer satisfaction ratings as a result of replacing paper-based transactions for digital interactions.

In 2019, the Council commenced a project to replace numerous paper-based systems — as well as overloaded telephone and in-person transactions — with online equivalents, with the aim of cutting costs and providing more-efficient services… particularly those that could be translated into self-service options.

“We weren’t meeting our community’s needs,” said City of Unley manager of business systems and solutions, James Roberts.

The Council chose Granicus’ OpenCities platform, which provides a low-code/no-code website design tool that could be widely used by Council staff.

“We needed a platform that was flexible enough to build these user-driven services that met our customers’ needs and they’d be quite simple to build, deploy and manage, and to integrate as well,” said Roberts.

The result was more than 1,500 content pages created or updated by more than 30 staff. Around 70 services are now available digitally.

Some of the outcomes of the project have included:

• An 80% decrease in paper form lodgements.
• Postage costs reduced by 50%; a saving of $90,000 per annum
• Corporate print costs down by 73%; a saving $60,000 per annum
• The Council’s highest-ever customer satisfaction rates (91% in May 2021)
• Making parking permit renewals available online has reduced the timeframe for completing the bulk of renewals from five months to two weeks.
• An online option for applying for and renewing parking permits is now being used by 85% of customers.