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  • Success Story
  • Horowhenua

Horowhenua District Council drives 90% digital uptake

Overview

Like many cities, many of Horowhenua’s key services were hard for customers to find and complete, or weren’t available online at all. For most people, transacting with the city meant having to call or visit their customer service centre during working hours, or print and mail requests.

Since partnering with OpenCities, now part of Granicus, HDC has digitised over 60 services and seen an unprecedented shift from customer service calls to clicks.

Project Metrics

  • 60+ Services have been digitised.
  • 90% Digital uptake by residence.
  • $1.8M In transactions processed through OpenForms.
  • 78% Of users completed and paid for their renewal in under 10 minutes.
Must-have Granicus solution

Situation

A digital vision and a 1 person team.

HDC needed a website and online forms solution that could deliver Council’s vision of digitising every over-the-counter service, whilst being easy-to-use without specialist skills, for Council’s 1 person digital team.

Solution

A technology that puts user experience front and center.

HDC was able to digitise services ranging from animal registration renewals and LIM applications, through to request forms and rates payments, measuring a significant uptake of online services by its community.

A task-focused homepage prioritises popular services by both season and device to help users find exactly what they need.

A predictive search intuitively connects people to the services and information they need as they are typing their query, even if they don’t know the exact name of the service.

Results
"Within the first month of launching, Horowhenua saw an unprecedented shift from customer service calls to clicks.... 33% of customers served themselves after business hours, and 78% of these completed and paid for their renewal in under 10 minutes."
Joanna Cooney, Website Officer

Many other popular services have also seen a significant digital uptake, with 90% of Property File Requests and LIM applications now being submitted & paid for online. By making payments more convenient and accessible, Horowhenua District Council has processed over $1.8M in transactions via OpenForms.

Making online forms easier for customers has benefited city staff as well. “Our Records Processing team like receiving online applications as they know all of the required fields have been completed in full, meaning less time is spent chasing up information that is missing. And our Compliance team has benefits too – with less processing and manual matching of internet banking payments”, adds Joanna.

With out of the box support for HDC’s payment gateway, setting up payment forms didn’t require any technical effort. And by connecting OpenForms with internal systems, HDC can validate information in real-time before finalising payments. For example, the dog registration renewal form checks registration reference numbers against Council’s internal records, before allowing customers to finalise their renewal.

"The platform we now have through OpenCities is agile, and we can get in there and do things really quickly. We don't have to think about what could be, we can actually just go and do it.”