Digital Transformation for People First Customer Services

Published on 24 September 2025

With a new call-system, and supportive call-assist technology, we can deliver better for you.

Our Customer Liaison Officers have the aim to answer 90% of your calls or enquiries within 10 minutes and Council’s digital transformation is helping them to help you.

Before now, if the answer couldn’t be found on our website – we’d need to talk to a subject matter expert in the back office. If they weren’t there, then we’d need to call you back once we’d found the answer. Not the most efficient way of sharing our knowledge.

How Council shares information needed to change so our team has as many answers at their fingertips as they can. Here's a quick explainer video:

Every Customer Liaison Officer has access to our Knowledge Base. That’s a shared system that every team in Council updates, and answers questions on. That means when you ask a question, every officer working for Council has access to high-quality consistent facts and information about our services.

It’s also helping our team answer your phone calls. The new Genesys call-assist technology helps our team answer your questions quickly, by using your questions to find relevant information in our Knowledge Base.

While these are big-tech solutions, from your point of view you’re going to be speaking to a person either at one of our Service Desks or when you call through to Council.

That’s a big part of our new ways of working as a transformed council, ensuring the customer has more opportunities to speak to our knowledgeable and helpful team, and they’re supported by the latest technology and Council’s team to solve your enquiries.

But wait, there’s more – parts of our Knowledge Base are available for the public to search, using our Chat and Messenger function on Council’s website.

By asking it questions, you can find answers quickly. That’s handy if it’s out of hours for Council, and you’ve got a question. It’ll also connect you to a Customer Liaison Officer within working hours too, if you can’t find what you’re looking for.

Here's the full section on our Digital Transformation, from our recent briefing.

ENDS

media@waitaki.govt.nz