Improving Customer Experience

Projects and activities planned for next financial year include:

• Facilitate meaningful, early and frequent participation in our projects by enhancing online engagement and survey tools
• Further improve digital experiences through delivery of an online application portal and personalisation options
• Refine our approach to customer insights and analytics to ensure we are working towards better outcomes for the community.

Engaging with Local Communities

We are delivering an unprecedented number of projects across both metropolitan and regional areas and while our road network is extensive, our community is just as diverse.

Engaging with the community and businesses and forming constructive relationships is vital to delivering our services. To achieve this, we run tailored engagement programs to keep everyone 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. These conversations guide our work from local planning through to final delivery while balancing technical and safety requirements and ensuring we deliver services that our community needs and wants.

We continue to provide further opportunities for the community to participate in decision-making through the Transport Portfolio's My Say Transport online engagement portal. Our strong digital presence ensures we provide the community and businesses with avenues to collaborate and stay informed on projects, with changes to the road network shared in real-time. We use our centralised customer relationship management system 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 provide high quality content to show the progress of our projects and the finished product, like the Armadale Road to North Lake Road Bridge wayfinding videos. These videos helped road users navigate the new road network and highlighted routes road users could take to get to key destinations and connecting roads around the project.

Our work can profoundly affect communities around WA by connecting them to more destinations, facilitating access to amenities, providing access to local jobs, and safer networks to travel on. This is why we provide a range of ways for the community and businesses to get involved. We host information sessions, reference groups and face-to-face meetings in addition to our online engagement tools, ensuring that the community, no matter where they live, can be a part of decisions that affect their daily lives.

Expanding our Customer Focus Reach

We already have good levels of existing infrastructure for active transport, and the future looks bright with record amounts being invested in upgrades. We are responsible for providing safe and reliable journeys for everyone that uses our road - whether that be in a truck, car, on a bike, by foot or anything in between.

We're also investing in meaningful engagement with community members of all ages. We know that working with the community is a critical part of our success and believe this statement is equally true for both current and future road users.

Early, innovative engagement allows us to build relationships and gather insights now to help us deliver a transport network centred on what all of our customers need and value. However, engaging in early years also serves another important purpose of encouraging our younger generation of road users, and potential engineers, to contribute to transport solutions of benefit in the future.

Encouraging future Road Users and Engineering Leaders

Giving new meaning to our promise to 'engage early', we've made it our mission to encourage future big thinkers to consider a career in engineering and how they can contribute to the future of transport.

We partnered with Curtin University this year to showcase future engineering opportunities to a group of female high school students. The students from the Girls Engineering Tomorrow program got a taste for the variety of work we do during a project site visit and tour of our Road Network Operations Centre. The day was capped off by a Q&A session with some of our female engineers and leaders who shared their knowledge and experience, encouraging the group to pursue a career in STEM and consider the pathways and opportunities Main Roads has to offer.

Year five and six students at Perth's Redcliffe Primary School received a special visit from our Tonkin Gap Alliance Team, who spent the day exploring what a future career in major infrastructure construction could look like. Students participated in hands on activities to discover and learn about engineering, community engagement, surveying, geotechnical engineering, environmental management and sustainability.

The initiative doubled as a community engagement opportunity, giving both students and their parents unfettered access to the otherwise 'boots-on-theground- busy' Tonkin Gap Project team to learn more about the project and what it involves now and over the next few years.

Road Safety focus for learner drivers

Good driving habits start early and in 2021, we worked closely with the licensing team from the Department of Transport to update the Drive Safe and Ride Safe Handbooks. Updated handbooks now include guidance on roadwork issues including temporary speed limits, traffic control and roadwork signs to help learner drivers understand WA road rules and how they can travel safely in all conditions. The updated handbooks, one of the 21 actions already completed from the Roadworks Signage Review, are a significant step forward to help some of our most vulnerable workers and road users, drive and arrive safely.

Providing safe crossing - hearing and visually impaired pedestrians

Facilitating safe pedestrian crossings may not sound glamorous, particularly when compared with the billiondollar projects in our pipeline. Make no mistake, it's just as important, particularly when you consider hearing and visually impaired users. This year, we rolled out new, sensor technology at selected, high-demand signalised crossings in the Perth metropolitan area. Pedestrians can now hover their hand over the sensor to activate the crossing as an alternative to the push button. The trial locations will continue to have physical push buttons, audible crossing tone and a vibrotactile arrow panel to assist hearing and visually impaired users. Rolled out during COVID-19, the sensors also double as a health and safety measure, reducing or eliminating the need to touch a public shared surface.

Disability Access and Inclusion

Over the year, we have been working on delivering key actions from the Main Roads Disability Access and Inclusion Plan 2018-2022. The plan recognises 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. During the year 19 actions from the plan were completed. To see some of the actions we have initiated visit our website.

Multicultural Action Plan

Last year we developed our inaugural Multicultural Plan 2021-2024 which aims to identify new ideas and acknowledge the work we do to create an inclusive environment that meets 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 25 actions including the identification of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse communities within project areas in the Communications and Stakeholder Engagement Strategy templates for all major projects. Another initiative was to ensure all employees understand how to access and engage interpreter services if needed. An outline of our achievements over the year is available on our website.

Listening to Our Customers

We value customer feedback and regularly investigate trends and issues that provide us with insights to improve our business areas. We gather this information in a variety of ways and have included the two primary methods here.

Community Perception Survey

Our annual Community Perception Survey has been providing us with valuable insights into customer experiences since 1994. The feedback about how we're performing in the construction, maintenance and management of the road network helps us to plan and deliver projects and services that are wanted, needed and expected. The following table shows this year' results.

At a state-wide level, the community also rated us highly in setting safe speed limits and providing dedicated bus and taxi lanes. Areas for improvement include managing litter on roadsides and verges and the condition of the road surface. To learn more about the Community Perception Survey, visit the Our Community page on our website.

Customer Complaints

Our complaints handling process meets the International Standard for Guidelines for Complaints Handling (ISO 10002-2018) and is based on seven principles. The focus is to deliver high quality experiences during every interaction. For more information, or to understand our commitments or to make a complaint please visit our website.

This year, 65 per cent of all customer complaints fell into one of 10 categories, as shown. This year we received 4,185 customer complaints with the highest area of concern being traffic signals closely followed by the impact of roadworks on commuters.

The area with the biggest increase this year was damage and reflects several issues associated with the impact of loose stones on the network following roadworks. In response to concerns raised by the community we have streamlined the approach that we take for members of the public to be able to lodge their damages claims via an online service.

We have also found that compared to previous years we have seen a reduction in complaints on signs, speed limits and community engagement.

Fault Reports

Many customers make contact 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 23,143 fault reports, the top fault type reported was for traffic signals.

Contact Information Centre

While the 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, last year has seen a 36 per cent decline in customer calls.

We have attributed this to reduced tourist traffic due to the border restrictions arising from COVID-19, less bushfires and cyclone activity than previous years and continued collaboration with regional offices on improved messaging through building customer confidence in information provided while giving customers regular status updates.

We have also seen the impacts of the ongoing education of customers on digital platforms including promoting the Travel Map for the latest information on road closures and conditions, promoting options to report issues via the website and enhanced messaging via our new phone system.