Building a Customer-Centric, Future-Ready Service Experience for Townsville City Council

Townsville City Council (TCC) wanted to rollout its new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Project Connect. The challenge for The Strategy Group was the ERP implementation not only to modernised systems but fundamentally uplift the customer and employee experience.

The Challenge

Townsville City Council (TCC) is undergoing one of its most significant transformations with the rollout of its new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Project Connect. With an ageing and diversifying population, increasing expectations for seamless digital services, and a complex legacy application environment, TCC sought to redesign how residents and businesses access and experience council services.

The challenge was ERP implementation not only modernised systems but fundamentally uplifted the customer and employee experiences, to replace fragmented processes with a unified, intuitive, and future-ready service model.

Our Approach: Co-Design at Its Core

Co-design end-to-end service blueprints and capability uplift that empower TCC to deliverseamless, consistent, and digitally-enabled customer experiences

The Strategy Group delivered a comprehensive service design program grounded in human-centred design and deep collaboration with internal teams, customers, and the ERP implementation partner. Key activities included:

• Facilitated cross-directorate workshops to identify, prioritise, and map ~15 core council services from an inside-out perspective.
• Conducted customer focus groups to understand pain points, emotional drivers, service expectations, and opportunities for improvement.
• Developed detailed current-state service blueprints, visualising value streams, customer actions, system interactions, and operational barriers.
• Co-designed future-state blueprints with council teams to align customer journeys with desired customer and employee experience.
• Uplifted internal capability through service design training, train-the-trainer, and the establishment of a Service Design Community of Practice.

The Outcome

By redesigning services with customers at the centre and aligning them with the ERP solution, TCC now has a clear blueprint for customer-centric transformation.

Through this engagement, The Strategy Group enabled TCC to:

• Visualise the entire customer experience across all core services, highlighting opportunities to simplify, digitise, and streamline.
• Identify critical pain points and moments of truth affecting satisfaction, operational performance, and trust.
• Establish future-state service blueprints that align directly with ideal customer and employee experience.
• Prioritise opportunities for service improvement, innovation, and digital uplift across departments.
• Strengthen cross-organisational alignment, enabling leaders to make informed decisions and unify teams around a shared customer-centric vision.
• Build sustainable service design capability, ensuring council staff can continuously improve services.