Customer Profile

The Sutherland Shire is located 26 kilometres south of the Sydney CBD, covering an area of 369 km sq and home to approximately 243,000 people. The Sutherland Shire is home to some of Sydney’s most iconic beaches such as Cronulla Beach, and is surrounded by significant natural areas including the Georges River and Port Hacking waterways, Kamay National Park and the Royal National Park – Australia’s oldest National Park to the south.

Challenge or problem

Like other Councils, Sutherland Shire has a key driver in improving the customer experience when interacting with Council. It was identified that the experience when booking councils venues and facilities was poor, for both the customer and Council staff.

The overall process was almost entirely manual, resulting in bookings only being made during business hours and customers having to physically come into council offices in order to make, finalise or pay for bookings, or collect and return keys. The flow on effect from this was low utilisation of Council’s venues, especially outside of Council business hours, and a poor customer experience.

Council staff spent considerable time on the phone discussing general venue information like space availability, suitability and booking requirements instead of processing bookings and payments or value adding to the overall customer experience. Booking information was typically double-handled and managed in silos that lead to potential errors and double bookings. All invoicing and refunds were manual, timely and required multiple checks to ensure accuracy.

Attekus solution

In 2020, Sutherland Shire Council implemented and went live with Attekus Bookable. The scope was to support bookings from casual and regular hirers across Council’s 34 community venues, 85 sports grounds, courts as well as film and event permits across the shire. Council has moved to a solution that now:

• • Provides online information, in real-time, on venue and space availability, suitability of use and booking requirements.
• • Allows customer to complete online bookings, including payments, with integration to Council’s payment gateway and ERP, TechnologyOne Financials.
• • Centralises all bookings into a single, enterprise solution, to increase visibility of booking information and data across the organisation.
• • Eliminates manual processes and streamline the internal review and approval for bookings across Council.
• • Improves venue utilisation through removing utilisation roadblocks put in place through previous manual and timely processes.

The results

The implementation of Attekus Bookable at Sutherland Shire Council has had a transformative impact for both its customers and internal staff. By embracing technology and providing its customers and community with an enterprise, deeply integrated, user-friendly solution, Sutherland Shire Council improved the overall customer experience through allowing customers to search venues, see real-time availability, make, pay and manage their bookings. Furthermore, Council improved the internal management of bookings through centralising all bookings into a single solution, streamlining internal operations and processes.

Removing manual processes through using Bookable and providing deep integration to Council’s core systems, like TechnologyOne Financials, resulted in an over 50% reduction in processing times for managing bookings, a dramatic reduction in both the number and length of customer interactions (phone and email) relating to bookings and significant reduction in customer account and debt management. This enabled Council to shift and become more proactive in the overall booking process resulting in council staff being able to “value add” and provide a great customer experience.