NMC is proud to commence our work with Maribyrnong City Council, to deliver a refreshed Putting Customers First Strategy (2025–2029). This project marks an important step in strengthening how Council connects with its community, ensuring services are easy to access, consistent, and backed by strong organisational capability.

Across Australia, councils are facing rising expectations around responsiveness, digital accessibility, and service transparency. Maribyrnong is proactively leaning into this shift, seeking a clear, evidence-based roadmap that improves customer experience while supporting long-term operational sustainability. Our role is to bring data, engagement, and best-practice design together to shape a strategy that is practical, measurable, and future-ready.

What This Project Will Deliver

The refreshed strategy will guide Council over the next four years, creating a stronger, more consistent customer experience across all service areas. It will be grounded in robust insights, extensive engagement, and national benchmarking.

Key outcomes include:

• A clear vision for the customer experience
  – Define what customers should consistently feel and achieve when interacting with us.
• An honest view of how customers experience us today
  – Highlight what’s working well and where we can deliver more value for them.
• A practical roadmap for improving customer outcomes
  – Lay out staged actions that make a real difference for customers at every step.
• An updated Customer Complaints Policy that builds trust
  – Ensure customers feel heard, respected, and confident their concerns lead to fair resolutions.
• A framework for continuous improvement focused on customer impact
  – Guide decisions and investments based on what matters most to customers over time.

Our Approach

The work will be delivered across four structured phases, each designed to build evidence, validate insights, and co-design solutions with staff, leaders, Councillors, and the community.

Our process includes:

• Gaining a strong understanding of how customers currently experience Council services
• Exploring the challenges and enablers staff see across systems, processes and communication
• Bringing in lessons from high-performing councils across Australia
• Engaging leaders, Councillors and community voices to validate priorities
• Co-designing a forward-looking strategy built on shared themes and achievable actions

Each step is designed to be collaborative, engaging, and anchored in real customer and staff insight.

Why This Matters

For Maribyrnong, this project is more than a strategy – it is an opportunity to build a genuine customer-first culture that improves trust, accessibility, and service consistency. For NMC’s it is a chance to utilise our CX expertise and deliver measurable impact, raising the benchmark for local government experience design.

The Strategy will provide Council with:

• Greater clarity on what excellent customer service looks like
• Better use of data to drive decisions and monitor improvements
• Stronger alignment between people, processes, systems, and community needs
• A roadmap that is achievable, costed, and ready for implementation

We look forward to sharing progress and insights as the project continues and to supporting Maribyrnong City Council in delivering a modern, accessible, and community-centred service experience.