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Providing a transport network centred on what our customers need and value
We are always endeavouring to:
Customer
We established our leading position in relation to the Western Australia Whole-of-Government Open Data Policy by this year releasing more data sets through our ‘Open Data,...
There is a significant program of projects planned in the next financial year, the following are just a few coming up or already underway
Our journey towards a new customer approach is underway. Over the year, we have conducted research and consultation with over 4,000 people to understand how our customers use the network, what they value in terms of transport outcomes and what their information requirements are. This is helping us to develop and deliver the right services, in the right way and at the right time to provide a transport network centred on what our customers need and value.
A key milestone of our work this year was the development of personas that are representative of our diverse customer base. These personas comprise unique needs, pain points, service requirements and opportunities for engagement that we will use to inform the Improving Main Roads Digital Experience project and our day-today interactions with customers.
We developed these personas using insights from research and consultation that canvassed over 2,600 members of the community. Some highlights of the research includes:
Top 3 reasons why people are contacting us:
Top 3 ways people want to contact us or receive information:
Top 3 services people expect from us:
We now have a clear picture of the core needs of our customers, summarised in the table below. Using this information, we will continue to implement our Improving Main Roads Digital Experience project and other customer experience initiatives to:
| Segment | Needs |
|---|---|
|
Travel Experience I need timely information to ensure a safe and reliable travel experience |
I need to understand my journey options I need information about things that affect my journey I need to understand how my journey will be impacted |
|
Information and Expertise I need to be able to easily access and understand information and expertise |
I need to be able to find and ask for the information I need I need to be able to understand the information I have I need to be able to understand how the information I have affects me |
|
Approvals and Applications I need to understand how to apply and know what is happening |
I need to be able to understand the application-approval process I need to be able to find the right application-approval form I need to be able to track my application-approval I need to be able to understand the status of my application – approval |
|
Provide Feedback I need to be able to have my say and see the affect |
I need to be able to provide feedback I need to be able to track its status I need to be able to see what affect I’m having |
Our Community Perception Survey has been conducted annually for more than 20 years. The survey provides us with important, up-to-date, customer-focussed information about our performance in the construction, maintenance and management of the road network to ensure that we can respond quickly and appropriately to community needs. The following table shows this year’s results.
| Satisfaction with | 2016 (%) | 2017 (%) | 2018 (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our overall performance | 91 | 87 | 88 |
| Road safety | 91 | 90 | 88 |
| Provision of cycleways & pedestrian facilities | 83 | 87 | 89 |
| Road maintenance | 88 | 84 | 82 |
| Sustainability | – | 85 | 86 |
| Environmental Management* | – | – | 88 |
*Collected for the first time in 2018
We also ask the community to rate our performance across a range of services and responsibilities. This helps us determine our strengths and priorities, insights which are then integrated into our strategic planning and day-to-day operations.
At a state-wide level, priority areas for Main Roads to address are related to road infrastructure and minimising congestion.
The following matrix shows our perceived strengths and priority areas.
For the first time this year, we conducted Focus Groups in the Great Southern and Wheatbelt to enhance our understanding of key regional issues identified in the Community Perception Survey. This marks a critical first step in addressing specific concerns and priorities that are unique to our regional customers.
Insights from the Focus Groups will now be used to develop strategies to improve regional customer experience and enhance our Community Perception Survey to ensure we continue to gather useful, relevant insights into the future.
We value customer feedback and regularly report on and investigate trends and issues, to provide insights for and to help improve our business areas. We continue to see an increase in the number of both customer requests and complaints. The types of feedback received from all sources across the past 12 months are shown below.
This year we received 9,803 customer requests. The top 10 categories are shown and represent almost 61 per cent of all customer requests.
9,803
customer requests
Data
Signs
Traffic Signals
Community Engagement
Speed Limits
Planning Issue
Other
Traffic Management
Projects
Road Works
65 per cent of all customer complaints fall into one of 10 categories, as shown. This year we received 5,355 customer complaints. Our Customer Information Centre and Complaints Handling Process aim to deal fairly with complaints and improve performance in all areas.
5,355
customer complaints
Traffic Signals
Road Works
Other
Clearways
Road Surface
Noise
Safety Issues
Damage
Traffic Management
Projects
We provide a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year service through our Customer Information Centre (CIC). The CIC plays an important role in state-wide incident response and management, providing timely and accurate information to the public. Our front-line customer service area is also an important information source for road network activity.
Self-service options on the phone continue to improve services for customers. Our call volumes have decreased during 2018, while our customer interaction via email and digital services have increased. Refining the channels we use to engage our customers continues to be a priority and will be a key outcome of the Improved Digital Experience project.
| Customer Contact Statistics | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telephone calls | 124,664 | 103,531 | 91,573 |
| Number of calls self serviced | 22,817 | 16,409 | 11,896 |
| Email enquiries | 21,046 | 30,474 | 32,620 |
| % Enquiries to Customer Information Centre resolved at first point of contact | 86 | 73 | 65 |
We provide an accessible, fair and equitable complaint handling process, meeting Australian Standard for Complaints Handling, AS ISO 10002 – 2006. Fifty-five per cent of respondents to last year’s complaints survey judged our handling of their complaint as satisfactory. This figure is based on our monthly complaints handling survey which aims to:
As we implement our new customer experience approach, we will review our complaints handling process and survey in line with the development of new customer key performance indicators.
In the meantime, for more information on complaints or to understand our commitment to follow through on your concerns, please visit our website.
We understand major infrastructure projects can create significant change and disruption, with issues such as land acquisition, environmental impacts and construction traffic affecting our reputation and performance as a good neighbour. Whilst it’s not always possible to achieve universal satisfaction we work closely with our stakeholders and the community, to reach mutually-beneficial outcomes wherever possible, based on the established principles of openness, transparency and proactivity.
In the past 12 months we have continued to develop and deliver consistent, valuable and centralised communication programs for projects, works and events on and within our road network. We have introduced stronger governance procedures to ensure best practice engagement is achieved from the conception of a project through to completion.
A key part of this process is the development of whole-of-project communications and stakeholder engagement strategies. This means centralised documents designed to underpin clear communications across the lifespan of a project, ensuring consistency of engagement as a project transitions through planning, development and into construction and delivery.
This customer-centric approach enables learnings to be captured and further collaboration between projects and cross-portfolio initiatives such as METRONET. It also provides a roadmap for our construction contractors once they mobilise to site and become the face of Main Roads in the community. The engagement approach we deploy varies across projects and is tailored based around demographics, the level of impact and intrusiveness a project may have or the nature of who will be impacted, for example schools, hospitals, aged care facilities or adjacent residents.
Importantly, our engagement approach is also determined by the community’s level of influence over a project, with early, interactive and faceto- face engagement generally favoured to ensure community input is used to shape key decisions at the earlier stages of planning. As a project progresses through development and into construction, our engagement programs evolve with the focus on ensuring communities are well informed about the nature of our work and the measures we have in place to manage the impacts of construction. Engaging at an earlier point within the project lifecycle enables us to integrate natural opportunities for regular evaluation following each phase of community input. Structured evaluations of our strategies are included at the end of the Planning, Development and Procurement stages of the project lifecycle, and again at six-monthly intervals during the construction period.
We have adopted new stakeholder engagement principles, based on the AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard 2015 (AA1000SES) to help us design, implement and assess quality stakeholder engagement that delivers integrated, sustainable outcomes.
In addition to the three AA1000 principles of Inclusivity, Materiality and Responsiveness, we have adopted the principle of Completeness, to align with our commitment to sustainability, driven by the Global Reporting Initiative.
The new AA1000SES principles underpin our engagement processes to ensure we can effectively manage expectations about how feedback and involvement will influence decision making, whilst considering project, commercial and political realities.
We have continued to provide project information and engagement opportunities through a range of mediums to reflect the diverse ways in which communities seek and digest information as demonstrated above. We have maintained a strong digital presence to ensure changes to the road network can be shared in real time, while introducing online engagement tools, including the use of community surveys, eliciting strong levels of participation.
This has been complemented through a drive to encourage subscriptions to online newsletters and project updates through our centralised Customer Relationship Management system, and the restructure of our projects website to create a more user-friendly customer experience. In the coming year we will pilot digital engagement software across several of our planning projects, to encourage broader and more inclusive community participation at earlier stages of project timelines. This approach will create a stronger two-way appreciation of the problems our emerging projects seek to address as well as improving the prospects of our works proceeding with broader community support. Importantly, the past 12 months have shown us that traditional community engagement techniques remain popular and relevant among the community.
This has been demonstrated through:
We remain committed to an appropriate mixture of traditional and contemporary forms of communication and engagement, carefully tailored to the information requirements of the communities and regions we are active in.
In addition to our regular media updates, we also provide travel journey information on a range of digital channels. We support business areas within Main Roads, such as incident management, and find this the best way to reach our customers. Following is an overview of our digital communication approaches.
Our website continues to be a popular source of information for the community with more than 1.8 million visitors to the website from more than 200 countries during the year.
As works ramped up on our infrastructure projects, so too did the desire for more project information. Heeding this call, we launched our new dedicated project website, harnessing an improved look and feel, and delivering a better experience to our customers.
Taking customer feedback on board, we updated our Travel Map to be mobile responsive, provide more clarity, include rest areas and a Google route planner. These enhancements allowed us to archive the Alerts page and have one official source of traffic and travel information for WA’s state road network.
Popular content includes:
Our Twitter following, for both our Metropolitan and Regional accounts continues to grow with both accounts used by other agencies and the media for real-time traffic updates. During major incidents we now use images to raise awareness on impacts, and this highlights the need to take alternative routes. Twitter continues to be a successful method of notifying road users of incidents or disruptions on the road network.
On our Facebook account, updates of what we are doing around the state help us stay in touch with the community. In the past year our Facebook following grew to more than 47,000. Our posts reached more than 5 million customers with images from catastrophic flooding being our most viewed post during the year, reaching more than half a million people organically.
We also created a project specific Facebook group for NorthLink WA, providing an additional channel of communication for the community. Currently more than 1,200 members have joined the group and are able to stay up to date with the latest network changes, impacts, construction progress and milestones.
YouTube showcases some of our services, network changes and fantastic images of our construction projects. Our YouTube subscribers increased by 43 per cent to 545 over the past 12 months and we expect this to continue as drone footage becomes more popular. We continue to promote this service across our other mediums.
Our Instagram account, started in January 2016, complements our digital channels. We have in excess of 1,600 followers and will continue developing our Instagram engagement focusing on trending hashtags and story highlights.
LinkedIn allows us to engage with those specifically interested in Main Roads business and services providing another channel in a suite of communications tools. Our following, which increased by around 2,200 over the past year, is now more than 6,400 followers.
After extensive internal and external consultation, we developed and launched our new Disability Access and Inclusion Plan 2018-2022 and supporting Implementation Plan. It aligns with the Western Australian Disability Services Act 1993 (amended in 2004 and 2014) produced in recognition that people with disability, their families and carers have the same rights to access our products and services as any other member of the community. The implementation of our plan is being monitored by an internal working group to ensure we keep access and inclusion a high priority when we are making decisions. The Main Roads Disability Advisory Group, which grew to 30 external community members during development of the plan, will be involved in supporting us to meet our commitments.