• Home
• Introduction
  • Introducing Our Report
  • Statement of Compliance
  • Introducing Us
• Snapshot
  • Highlights of the Year
  • Challenges and Opportunities
  • Performance Scorecard
  • Finance Summary
  • Workforce Profile
• Our Leaders
  • Commissioner's Review
  • Managing Director's Message
  • Corporate Executive
• Performance
  • How We Achieve Government Goals
  • Road Safety
  • Road Efficiency
  • State Development
  • Maintenance
  • Community Access
  • Office of Road Safety
  • Road Management
• Business Activities
  • Environmental Management
  • Enhancing Relationships
  • Developing Capabilities
  • Safety, Health and Wellbeing
• Governance
  • Principle 1
  • Principle 2 & 3
  • Principle 4
  • Principle 5
  • Principle 6
  • Principle 7
  • Principle 8
  • Principle 9
• Performance Measures
  • Statement of Certification
  • Key Performance Measures
  • Financial Statements
  • Notes to Financial Statements (PDF)
• Appendices
  • Appendices
  • Glossary
  • Acronyms

Enhancing Relationships

Providing the Right Roads for Our Community

We strive to make roads work for all road users in Western Australia by creating and sustaining an open, supportive and responsive organisation.

Key Performance Indicators

	2011	2012	2013
% of our commitment to customer service delivery	89%	94%	93%
% satisfied with our overall performance	97%	95%	94%
% stakeholders satisfied with their interactions with Main Roads1	92%	N/A	94%

1 The Stakeholder Satisfaction Survey is conducted biennially.

Introduction

Our aim is to form strong collaborative relationships based on mutual respect and benefit that lead to solutions and value creation for the community and our partners.

The Principles below form the foundation for enhancing our internal relationships and relationships with our stakeholders and partners:

• Engaging with the community and all partners
• Nurturing internal and external relationships
• Developing trust by delivering commitments, attaining win-win outcomes
• Responding proactively, especially advocating for public service
• Challenging the Status Quo by adopting wisdom of crowd approach allowing for emergence of new ideas
• Acknowledging everyone’s contribution
• Ensuring the early involvement of key stakeholders
• Achieving our common goals in an environment that engages, informs and connects people
• Developing new relationships to explore new business opportunities.

Key Achievements

Customer Service Strategy

We have a history of delivering excellent customer services supported by strategies such as Excellence in Roads. This strategy aligned operational customer service outcomes to internationally recognised standards thereby providing excellence in front line customer service strategy.

Our new Customer Service Strategy is aimed at the delivery of excellent services to our customers and focuses on building on our operational strengths to achieve road user outcomes. Our new strategy supports our new Strategic Plan, ‘Towards 2020’, with a strong focus on understanding our customers and their needs. In addition, the new strategy focusses on using technology to improve communication and information delivery and the foster a customer centric culture.

Customer Charter Index

The commitments in the Customer Service Charter are measured by the Customer Charter Index (CCI). The index incorporates a range of measures to deliver our commitments to our customers. We report our performance against these measures quarterly on our website. As we improve processes and technology across the organisation, these measures will evolve to reflect customer needs and to challenge us. The overall result is 93.4% against a target of 100%.

Community Perception Survey

The Community Perception Survey (CPS) has been conducted annually for 18 years to track Main Roads performance on a range of issues such as road safety, cycling and pedestrian facilities and maintenance of the road network.

In 2012, we also started capturing information on what type of issues are priorities for the Western Australia community enabling us to more clearly align the results of the CPS to our business planning cycle and focus our efforts on improving priority areas.

The 2013 CPS was conducted in April and results were reported to Corporate Executive. The following are some highlights of the indicators that were measured:

Satisfaction with	2011	2012	2013
Our overall performance	97%	95%	94%
Road Safety	95%	92%	94%
Providing cycle ways & pedestrian facilities	90%	76%	83%
Road maintenance	94%	90%	84%

Some key points from the 2013 survey report identified that metropolitan road users are concerned with traffic congestion and want easy access to real time traffic information to help plan their journeys or make changes en route. Regional road users are concerned about safety when driving on our roads and the impact that heavy vehicles have on the quality of roads.

As explored elsewhere in this report, we have seen increasing pressure on the services we provide as our population grows and our urban environment continues to change. As we have addressed some of these issues, many infrastructure projects and road improvement initiatives implemented have impacted road users during the last 12 months and caused disruptions to their journeys. This may have been a contributing factor in this year’s CPS outcome with the slight downward trend in satisfaction.

Stakeholder Satisfaction Survey

The biennial Stakeholder Satisfaction Survey was conducted in May 2013 with the overall objective being to gauge the satisfaction of stakeholders with their interactions and business dealings with Main Roads. Results of the survey were reported to Corporate Executive and assisted us in prioritising areas for the development of strategic initiatives or interventions to improve our relationships with stakeholders.

The survey was completed by 318 primary stakeholders; an increase of almost 20% from the 2011 survey. More than 2,200 comments were received which included expressions of dissatisfaction, compliments and suggestions for improvement. All comments have been analysed along with the results of the survey and a list of improvement actions put into place.

It was pleasing to see that 94% of our stakeholders consider our interactions to be okay, good or excellent which is slightly higher than the 92% satisfaction achieved in 2011.

Perceptions of our performance on key attributes is positive with between 55% and 88% of stakeholders rating service interactions as good or excellent, 15 of the 26 attributes measured scored 70% or better.

The top five service attributes showing our strongest performance were:

• Responding to your queries in a professional and friendly manner
• The quality of telephone communication
• Providing information that is clear and easy to understand
• The overall ease of doing business with Main Roads (the highest driver of overall satisfaction)
• The quality of face-to-face communication.

Customer Feedback

As an organisation, we use customer feedback to improve our business practices. There are a number of ways customers can provide us with feedback and these can be found on our website. Our new website now enables customers to provide feedback using an online form.

To ensure all employees have the appropriate skills in capturing and actioning customer feedback, a ‘customer service’ section is now included for all new employees during their induction. This complements our online training in complaints handling and the deliverables in the customer service charter.

We analyse and report monthly to Corporate Executive on complaint trends and customer interactions. The closed loop reporting cycle introduced in 2011 allows the Business Improvement Committee to monitor improvements in customer outcomes as a result of targeted activities around high trending complaints and the actions taken to eliminate or reduce these complaints.

The following shows the types of feedback that we received:

Feedback Type	2012	2013
Complaints	1,783	2,789
Compliments	154	218
Customer Requests	336	456
Business Improvements	100	55

This table shows the top five areas of complaints:

Category of Complaints	2012 (%)	2013 (%)
Traffic Signals	12	10
Planning Issues	10	9
Safety Issues	9	9
Road Works	6	7
Road Condition/Quality	6	7

For more information on our Complaints Handling Process, please refer to our Governance section.

Online Services

Demand for provision of information on our website continues to grow rapidly with many customers indicating a preference for self service options. Our website underwent a redesign in April 2013 to improve the communication of traffic incidents on the network. Planning has commenced for a project to review the full website and create enhanced customer friendly content and navigation by 2015. We continue to research new channels of communication to continue improving the way we communicate with road users.

Twitter

Twitter is a highly successful method of communication for the delivery of incident and traffic information on our road network. We have a following, which to our knowledge is unmatched by any other road agency in Australia. As at the 30th June 2013, the Perth metropolitan Twitter account now has more than 17,000 followers. The WA Roads Twitter account, which provides regional traffic information, has experienced a steady growth, with this account now having almost 3,000 followers. On average, we tweet 475 times per month.

YouTube

To help our customers gain a greater understanding and awareness of significant changes to our services and network, we now have a YouTube channel. As at the end of June 2013, there are 11 videos to view, which have received more than 8,200 views. This is a new channel of communication that we will continue to explore.

Customer Service Advisory Council

Established in 2006, the Customer Service Advisory Council has supported our improvement in service delivery and challenged us to extend and broaden our thinking in our operations, projects and strategic planning. The Council challenges our various business areas to improve customer outcomes.

During the year, the Council provided feedback and direction on:

• Improvements to how we publish information on our ‘Roadside Amenities and Rest Areas’
• The CBD Congestion Strategy (including communications)
• The Incident Response Service in the Northbridge Tunnel
• The upgrading of the Northbridge Tunnel to three lanes in each direction and the widening of the Mitchell Freeway northbound from the City to Powis Street.

The Council is independently chaired by Edd Black, Principal of Huntingdale Primary School and has community and industry members representing our diverse road users.

Customer Information Centre

The Customer Information Centre (CIC) provides a 24 hour, seven days a week service to the community. It provides information using a range of communication tools catering for diverse community needs across the State.

The CIC plays an important role in State-wide incident management providing timely and pertinent information to the public and stakeholders. Cyclones, bushfires, storms and major incidents kept the CIC team busy this year assisting communities and road users in affected areas across the State.

Emails continue to be a major channel of choice by customer with the CIC responding to an average of 1,700 emails per month. All emails are responded to within 24 hours of receipt with 80% of email queries being answered on first reply.

Customer Contact Statistics	2011	2012	2013	Variance
Telephone Calls	239,782	208,140	150,234	-57,906*
Email Enquires	16,014	18,104	20,612	+2,508
Perth Twitter followers	3,670	10,516	17,099	+6,583
Perth Tweets	2,155	6,266	5,098	-1,168
WA Roads Twitter Followers	N/A	748	2,750	+2,002
WA Roads Tweets	N/A	324	619	+295

*HVO Helpdesk commenced service in November 2012.

Calls and emails are analysed monthly to identify why people call and email us. The results are used to improve information and services for customers by targeted improvements in online services, process improvements and the elimination of barriers to customer outcomes.

Disability Access and Inclusion Plan

Main Roads revised Disability Access and Inclusion Plan (DAIP) was launched in 2012 and is valid to 2016. The Plan’s main objective is achieving the State Government’s vision for a better quality of life for all Western Australians. The DAIP recognises that people with disabilities, their families and carers have the same rights to access our services and employment opportunities as any other member of the community. The Plan adds further emphasis to the significant progress that we have already made in addressing the needs of people with disabilities since its inception in 1995. The DAIP’s framework outlines a suite of strategies to enable us to achieve seven outcomes during the five year life of the plan. Our progress on each is reported to the Disability Services Commission annually. The following table details these outcomes and the number of strategies that were planned and, completed as well as those progressed by contractors.

Outcome	Number of strategies planned (Strategies planned, whether implemented or not)	Number of strategies completed (Strategies that were completed, including on-going strategies)	Number of strategies progressed through contractors (Strategies implemented by contractors, not the number of contractors)
Outcome 1: Have the same opportunity as other people to access the services of, and any events organised by Main Roads.	5	5	3
Outcome 2: Have the same opportunity as other people to access the buildings and other facilities of Main Roads.	7	5	3
Outcome 3: Should receive information from Main Roads in a format that will enable them to access the information as readily as other people are able to access it.	6	3	0
Outcome 4: Should receive the same level and quality of service from the staff of Main Roads as other people receive.	6	3	1
Outcome 5: Have the same opportunities as other people to make complaints to Main Roads.	1	1	0
Outcome 6: Have the same opportunities as other people to participate in any public consultation by Main Roads.	6	6	2
Outcome 7: Have the same opportunities as other people to access employment at Main Roads.	1	1	0

A copy of the current DAIP can be found on our website.

Advisory Groups

To ensure that our operations are open, accountable, fair and flexible, we collaborate with a wide range of customers and stakeholders who provide essential input to operational aspects of our business. The table below lists the various advisory groups that we have and frequency of our meetings with them.

Advisory Group	Meeting Frequency per Annum
Customer Service Advisory Council	4
Cycling and Pedestrian Advisory Group	3
Disability Advisory Group	12
Environmental Advisory Group	2
Western Australian Road Construction and Maintenance Industry Advisory Group	4
State Road Funds to Local Government Advisory Committee	3
Traffic Management for Works on Roads Advisory Group	4
Traffic Management for Events Advisory Group	4

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