Award-winning website drives 16.5% increase in proper recycling

As Hutt City Council’s (HCC) Customer Experience Channels Manager, it’s Steve Beckett’s role to help the council adapt to the evolving preferences of a diverse customer base.

We started as a web team that saw the need for a more holistic view. We evolved into a team that strives to bring more focus to the wider customer experience.

The challenge

The 112,500 residents of Hutt City have a range of expectations when it comes to their online experiences.

“We’re not just selling a product into a normal e-commerce market segment,” says Steve.

Meeting the needs of every “customer” is no mean feat for public sector organizations. To overcome the challenge, Steve’s team’s goals required a digital transformation and new ways of working across the business. But legacy technology was holding them back. The team had been using the same content management system (CMS) for more than 15 years and it was failing to keep up with their requirements.

Poor integrations were creating disjointed experiences for both employees and citizens. HCC needed to seamlessly transfer data between platforms, better understand their citizens, and make data-driven decisions about their digital experiences.

Challenges:

• Little customer data – limiting HCC’s opportunities to create personalized and relevant content and digital experiences
• Siloed teams
• Legacy technology and ways of working
• Disjoined customer and employee experiences
• Siloed technology
• Substandard search
• Design restrictions

The projects

The old days of putting in a monolithic system that just does its job over its lifetime are fading. It's more about picking the right technology with enough flexibility to scale and grow with the business. It’s not thinking about just one channel but many, and funneling people in the right direction or through channels to simplify their options. It’s breaking down the walls that exist across customer journeys…

The team needed a Composable DXP to achieve this. With Squiz, HCC moved from a standard CMS – with only content management capabilities – to a full suite of capabilities, enabling the team to focus on the customer, collect more data on citizens, and provide opportunities for the web personalization that would create the tailored online experiences they were looking for.

Together, since 2021, HCC and Squiz have utilized Squiz’s Content Management and Site Search capabilities, and data services to introduce:

• An educational web app to help improve citizens’ recycling behavior
• Revamped council and art museum websites
• A payment gateway consolidation project

The results

16.5% increase in proper recycling 

Contaminated waste can be expensive for local governments to rectify. The site launch has been a great tool for educating the community on which bins to use. Since its launch, HCC has experienced a 16.5% increase in proper recycling.

Web users are finding information faster

• Website visits continue to increase, rising by 16.6% in the first half of  2024.
• HCC’s property search usage doubled upon initial  launch of the updated website interface.
• Bounce rates have dropped from 56.36% to 34.7%.
• Contact center calls have decreased.
• Time spent on web pages has increased.

Bottlenecks have been removed with SaaS

Outsourcing our technology stack has ensured we have dedicated support whenever required and we’re not reliant on internal resources for development which caused bottlenecks beforehand.

The Squiz DXP is making it easier for Steve’s team to efficiently manage multiple channels – websites, web apps, social media properties – and devolve content management to subject matter experts across the business.

HCC wins website of the year award

At the ALGIM Awards 2023, HCC was presented with the ‘website of the year’ award. The council was assessed on its commitment to web standards, accessibility features, digital services, engagement rates, and online presence within the local government sector.

The accolade was a reflection of the team’s hard work to continuously improve the website, which in the 12 months prior to the award had included:

• Creating design consistency across the website for an improved user experience.
• Catering to different cultures and website navigation preferences, with the inclusion of te reo Māori and an intuitive icon-led design.
• Ensuring pages were kept clean and free of any broken links or stray HTML tags.
• Identifying and working on areas of improvement for accessibility.
• Reviewing and updating content to meet their plain English standards across the site.
• Ensuring decisions were customer research and facts-driven rather than subjective.

The team also now regularly trains new staff in the latest accessibility requirements, to ensure they maintain the standards they have been recognized for.

This award win was the icing on the cake for the HCC team who have been reaping the rewards of a unified platform powered by Squiz SaaS DXP. The team no longer has to worry about platform maintenance or laborious upgrades. They are always on the latest product version, with the most up-to-date features and automatic security updates – giving Steve and the team “peace of mind.”

Data now also flows easily across the platform and offers HCC a more detailed view of citizens' and employees’ habits and preferences.

The council can also offer website visitors faster load times, alongside an intuitive site search function – meaning citizens can find relevant information quicker than ever.

Bottom line – users are getting to their destinations more effectively. - Steve Beckett.

We also have more visibility of content that holds value. That means we can begin to model content more effectively, in preparation for more intelligent content, and not spend so much time serving different channels. There are changes required at an organisational level to enable that but we are aiming for more focus in this space. There are more opportunities with our progressive web app too in having a more direct conversation with users, especially in service messaging.

The immediate focus has been on educating people toward using a particular service more effectively, but having a targeted app now gives us a platform to extend and build on.

I think going forward the DXP advantage for us is about ease of use and having flexible frameworks so improvement can be made quickly. You don’t want long development cycles you want to be able to slowly mold the technology till it's optimal. It's about being able to make continuous improvements or grow with advances elsewhere in technology.

HCC removes external agency reliance and costs

Since Hutt City Council implemented the full Squiz DXP suite in February 2024, they have removed their reliance on external developers and gained more control over their web experiences. After quickly completing two new projects, the team saw incredible results and dramatic cost savings in the first six months.

Long Term Plan (LTP) site

Before implementing the Squiz DXP, the council relied on an external design company for the build of their LTP site. This process could often take 2-3 months.

This year, the team has become self-sufficient and built the entire LTP consultation site themselves. Instead of months in a developer queue, the team had the site up in just one month.

This hands-on approach allowed them to react quickly to feedback and make updates on the fly, creating a far more user-friendly, structured experience than the previous year’s overwhelming page.

The Squiz DXP also enhanced the team's ability to integrate their website with multiple channels. Now, Hutt City can seamlessly link various platforms, including social media, to boost website traffic and increase submissions.

The results? They saw more site submissions in the first week than during the entire previous month-long consultation, all while money that would’ve otherwise gone to an external design agency.

We all got together and worked more collaboratively internally. Because we were doing it all ourselves, it gave us the ability to tie everything together with full visibility. – Nicole Noldus, Customer Experience Advisor at Hutt City.

Hubs & Library services website rebuild

Next up was the Hubs & Library services website, which was running on an outdated library management interface. Before the DXP, the team could not have built this site themselves. And with limited funds and resources, this investment stayed on the to-do list for quite some time.

Using the DXP, the team developed a fresh, more functional website that they were able to thoroughly test and optimize in-house. They created custom page components and used low-code solutions, making it easy for non-technical library staff to update content any time.

The results were impressive: the project had huge cost savings for the council by building in-house, and significantly improved the user experience by better integrating the website and library catalog.

The ability to be able to go in and make it better myself is just so nice. It’s about efficiency - why would I wait two weeks for a meeting when I could just figure it out now? – Nicole Noldus.

Looking ahead

Building on the success of these projects, the team is now gearing up to rebuild the council's pools website, applying the same skills and processes they've honed with Squiz DXP.

They’re also exploring more advanced features of the platform, like A/B testing and enhanced data analytics, to further refine their digital strategy.