Site of the month: The NZ Transport Agency

This month’s ‘Site of the Month’ is more than just a website. Working with the SilverStripe team, the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) succeeded in building a new digital platform that improves their customer experience and transforms the way the agency works in the public sector.

Transporting New Zealand

The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) supports Kiwis to move safely and effectively about the country. 1,450 staff across 14 offices (and a network of agents) help manage 11,000 kms of state highways, provide services like driver or vehicle licensing, and offer information about travelling safely on New Zealand’s roads.

Millions of visitors use their core website every year, accessing a huge volume of information – more than 15,000 website pages and 90,000 documents. The NZTA have been at the forefront of the New Zealand government’s push to make it easier for people to access core services digitally.

Improving the customer experience

NZTA wanted to refresh their core website to meet the needs of its stakeholders, while building a sustainable way of continually improving their customers' digital experience.

“One of the first things that we did was understand what our customers actually wanted from our digital channels and build with that in mind. When you go to our website, the three biggest things that people want to do are: a transaction with us such as register their vehicle, look for traffic information or find information around driving safely,” said Paul Giles, NZTA’s Manager Communications Channels Services. “We get the biggest impact if we allow people to easily complete a single task (such as licence their vehicle). What happens is that people come back multiple times to do a task, rather than browse around and hope to find things. That easy experience is a core principle for us.”

The NZTA website was built on the the Common Web Platform (CWP) – a platform as a service offering for New Zealand Government websites.

Paul said cost competitiveness was a baseline, particularly the ability to start with an existing platform and share and reuse as they went. “SilverStripe were also stronger on the experience they’ve had with other government agencies, with an understanding of how to guide them through these processes”.

Increasing agility

While the SilverStripe content management system (CMS) underlying the CWP has
been key to building a strong digital platform that allows customers to engage more easily with NZTA, the introduction of an agile approach was also a crucial benefit, says Paul.

“SilverStripe invested extra time and resources to make sure agile methodology would work for us. It was a good process that got a lot of people in our organisation engaged, from what predominantly a waterfall shop”.

Making digital transformation happen in the public sector

Paul says by using an agile approach they actually launched the site as a beta over
a six-month period, putting services live progressively, receiving feedback and then improving them.

“That meant throughout the cycle of the project if we saw some feedback coming in on our beta site we could get those changes made because we were still in flight on the project, rather than in final delivery.”

Paul concludes, “The value SilverStripe offers begins with their partnership approach and them wanting to work with us to achieve really good business outcomes. Ultimately it means that our digital customer experience is improved.”

The success of our work with NZTA is also available in a full case study.

If you are interested in working with us to make digital transformation happen in your organisation, please send us a message.