Improving Customer Experience

Listening to our Customers

We are continuing to deliver unprecedented works across the state and while our road network is extensive, we recognise that our community is just as diverse. Engaging with the community and businesses and forming positive relationships is vital to delivering our services.

To achieve this, we have tailored stakeholder and engagement programs to keep the community informed about upcoming works and disruptions, address local traffic issues, educate the community on road safety, and consult and build conversations around major infrastructure projects and future road networks. This guides our work from planning through to delivery while balancing technical and safety requirements and ensuring we deliver services that our community needs and wants. We also provide the ability for the community to participate in decision-making through the My Say Transport online portal and our strong digital presence ensures we provide the community and businesses with avenues to collaborate and stay informed on projects, shared in real-time.

We use our centralised Customer Relationship Management System, CONNECT, to share project information and promote avenues to stay informed on our projects. More than 47,000 Western Australians use this system to stay engaged. We know that early, proactive engagement allows us to build relationships and gather insights to help us deliver a transport network centred on what our customers need and value. The following outlines some of those results over the last 12 months.

Community Perception Survey

Our annual Community Perception Survey allows us to gather critical insights into customer experiences across Western Australia. Feedback about how we are performing in the construction, maintenance and management of the road network helps us plan and deliver valuable projects and services that keep WA moving. Following are the results over the last three years:

While there has been a slight decline, customers continue to positively rate our performance for the construction, maintenance, and management of the state road network; highlights including 89 percent rating for Road Safety and 88 per cent overall performance. To learn more about the Community Perception Survey, visit the Our Community page on our website.

How We Handle Feedback and Complaints

We use an accessible, fair, and equitable feedback and complaints handling process that meets the International Standard for Guidelines for Complaints Handling (ISO 10002-2018). Guided by our seven Feedback and Complaint Handling Principles, we aim to deliver high quality experiences during every interaction. The following outlines those principles with a brief explanation.

Improving our approach

As always, we seek to continuously improve our approach and have undertaken and deployed the following additional activities to help us:

Objectivity

This year, we appointed an additional Customer Advocate to act as a point of contact where complaints are escalated. Customer Advocates are our own staff that have a high-level experience in customer service and community engagement. They provide objective and independent advice on any matters not resolved by standard feedback and complaints handling processes; advocates are committed to achieving the best possible outcome for the customer.

Participation

We have streamlined our Customer Feedback Survey process, making it quicker and easier for customers to provide feedback about recent interactions with us. Activity in our Customer Relationship Management System triggers an automated delivery – a survey immediately, and directly to customers and stakeholders. Responses from these surveys are analysed and categorised to determine opportunities for improvements and how best to implement them throughout the business.

Accessibility

Improvements to our Customer Relationship Management System have made it easier for internal operators to capture and visualise key information related to customer and stakeholder interactions. We enhanced how data and heavy vehicle queries, and fault reporting are delivered and recorded, with new categories implemented to ensure we accurately capture and analyse data that will provide insights to drive improvements.

Customer Complaints and Fault Reports

This year, we received 4,195 customer complaints with the highest area of concern being traffic signals, followed by road works. Of all customer complaints, 67 per cent fell into one of 10 topic categories.

Many customers contact us to report faults, providing valuable assistance to the challenging task of continuously improving the condition and appearance of our road network. Last year we received 21,970 fault reports where top fault type reported was for traffic signals.

Expanding our customer focus and reach

The following are just some of the ways that we have taken to recognise the diversity and breadth of our customers and the methods we use to communicate with them. This is not an exhaustive list but focusses on a few of our customers and stakeholders and some of the different tools that we use.

Transforming Heavy Vehicle Customer Experience

We are on a journey to transform the digital and service experiences of our heavy vehicle freight operators. Driven by industry feedback, a future focussed five-year program aims to meet the evolving needs of the local transport industry and provide safe, sustainable, and efficient Restricted Access Vehicle (RAV) access to our road network, and includes:

• Development of a new customer portal – including Traffic Escort Services functionality
• Undergrounding of powerlines on key over size over mass (OSOM) freight routes
• Improved industry advisory services such as heavy vehicle travel impact RAV mapping layer and introduction of SMS notifications
• Adoption of technology to improve service delivery through updating and replacing systems.

Some of our planned works are outlined here:

Customer Portal

We are developing a customer portal that integrates with our back-end systems, providing customers with access to real-time information about their accounts and services. The portal will include features such as traffic escort services bookings, application submission and progress tracking, self-managed information capabilities and a payment portal. These features enable customers to manage their business with us efficiently and quickly.

Service Optimisation

We are adopting new technologies to optimise our operations, by leveraging these technologies, we will improve service delivery and reduce turnaround times for customer requests. Our Compliance Automation project will see an expected time reduction of up to 60 per cent for our Transport Inspectors to complete on-road intercepts, where no offences are detected. Our SMS notification project will see subscribed customers receive notifications of unplanned heavy vehicle travel impacts delivered to their nominated devices.

Undergrounding Powerlines on Key Oversize Over-mass (OSOM) Freight Routes

Next year we will partner with Western Power to underground powerlines on key OSOM freight routes. The intent is to create an OSOM powerline corridor along Great Eastern Highway and Great Northern Highway which will reduce the need for transport operators to engage powerline lift and escort crews.

Stakeholder Engagement

We continued to deliver our state-wide industry information sessions and workshops, attend agricultural events, and trade shows, and utilise our engagement platform, My Say Transport, to understand the needs of our customers. We will collaborate with other organisations to develop new services (including digital) that meet the needs of our customers and allow them to efficiently manage their business.

With the Digital Strategy for the Western Australian Government and our Keeping WA Moving strategic direction top of mind, we will continue to engage with our customers and stakeholders in the WA transport industry to ensure innovative solutions meet needs now and into the future.

Disability Access and Inclusion

In October 2022 we launched our first Transport Portfolio Disability Access and Inclusion Plan (DAIP) 2022-27, which was developed in collaboration with Main Roads, Department of Transport and Public Transport Authority. The DAIP includes strategies the Portfolio has identified to improve access, inclusions, and opportunities for people with disability, their families and carers and is supported by our own implementation plan that identifies actions that will be executed over the next five years. To see the Transport Portfolio DAIP visit our website.

Multicultural Action Plan

Our Multicultural Plan aims to identify new ideas and acknowledge the work we do to create an inclusive environment meeting the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse employees and communities. We developed a range of actions in consultation with customers, stakeholders, and employees and during the year completed a further 24 actions. A case study on our Internal Communications has been included by the Australian Human Rights Commission in their new Workplace Cultural Diversity Toolkit launched in July 2022. This showcases how we are working towards normalising cultural diversity in the workplace. An outline of our Plan is available on our website.

Customer Information Centre

Our Customer Information Centre continues to play an important role in state-wide incident response and management, especially through providing timely and accurate information to the public. While call volumes have increased slightly over the past year, we are continuing to see that our efforts to promote and provide other forms of accessing information continue to provide new options for customers to obtain information in a timely manner.

Some of these factors include:

• Continued education of customers to self-serve
• Increased public confidence in our Travel Map having the most up to date information
• Introduction of our Kimberley Flood Response page on our website due to the high levels of interest and impact to the community supported by increased media coverage of the event
• Overall quiet cyclone and bushfire season with no incidents causing significant call volumes