Maribyrnong City Council has endorsed its Putting Customers First Strategy 2026-29, giving the organisation a clear framework for improving the more than 100,000 customer interactions it manages each year. It’s a strong outcome for Council, and one NMC is proud to have led.

But the strategy itself is only the visible end point. The more interesting story is what it takes to get there, and why that process matters far beyond any single council.

A sector under pressure

Local government CX is under real strain. Communities expect the responsiveness of a private-sector service, delivered by organisations built for different constraints: legacy systems, layered governance, and services that span everything from bins and building permits to libraries and events. Add population growth and rising diversity into the mix, and the gap between expectation and delivery becomes harder to manage.

Councils know this. What most are missing isn’t intent, but a credible, evidence-based path from where they are to where they need to be.

Our approach

That’s the gap NMC’s CX work is designed to close. Rather than starting with assumptions about what “good” looks like, we start with evidence: how services are experienced by community, where the friction sits, and what’s driving it.

Our framework assesses experience across the full organisation, not just the front line. Strategy, people, process, systems, and governance all shape what a customer ultimately feels when they contact council. A strategy that only looks at the contact centre misses most of the picture.

Building strategies that hold up

Good-looking strategy documents are easy to produce. Strategies that survive contact with a real organisation are harder, and that’s what we strive to deliver. Three principles guide the development of our work:

• Bring the people who deliver it into the room. Staff, leaders, councillors, and community all shape and validate direction, so the strategy reflects how the organisation actually works, not how it looks on paper.
• Benchmark against real performance. Comparing against high-performing & similar councils keeps recommendations grounded and defensible, rather than aspirational.
• Sequence for delivery. Every roadmap is staged and built to survive the transition from endorsement to implementation. Strategies that stall after sign-off aren’t strategies, they’re wish lists.

Beyond Maribyrnong

Maribyrnong’s result holds up on the measures that matter. The strategy was endorsed after direct input from staff, leaders, councillors and community, reflecting the diverse stakeholder needs. It was benchmarked against comparable councils to keep every recommendation grounded in real performance rather than aspiration. And it landed as a staged roadmap across the organisation’s service areas, built to survive the move from endorsement to delivery.

That’s the work NMC does well – strategies built to be delivered, measured, and improved on. We’ve applied this same thinking across councils facing similar pressures: growing communities, ageing systems, workforce challenges and rising expectations.

Congratulations to the team at Maribyrnong on reaching this milestone. If your council is grappling with similar challenges, we’d love to work with you – contact us today.