Leading the way with advanced technology

The City of Sydney was struggling to ensure its services were delivered in the right way by providing inclusive and easily discoverable content. A convoluted internet archive and an antiquated content management system made for a complex and confusing environment.

Users were often unaware of the full breadth of services they could access through the city. Finding the right information or completing an appropriate form was a challenge, and as a result, services were being underutilized and users were spending more time working out what they had to do and less time doing it.

The City of Sydney’s centralized content team were also trying hard to keep up with organizing, classifying and delivering content, often having to duplicate information for different contexts. This led to content maintenance and consistency issues, increases in calls to the contact center, and overall dissatisfaction with the website.

The content team required the power to deliver a strong customer experience and leverage the latest technology. They needed to deliver a seamless, responsive, accessible, and future-focused solution to meet the demands of its users, even during peak periods. Most of all, the City of Sydney needed to be seen as a leader in delivering the web experience to its audience, while making the web authoring experience powerful but simple at the same time.

The City of Sydney used Sitecore JavaScript Services™ (JSS), a headless accelerator, and other tools to build a suite of bespoke components to meet the needs of the City of Sydney’s information model and services. Sitecore's JSS approach allowed these custom components to be available for the authoring experience through the Experience Editor, and for reuse and flexibility.

Purpose-built authoring mode enhancements offered an intuitive ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ experience to content authors. Other improvements resulted in a Single Page App that is both SEO friendly and highly performant. Sitecore was used to store intents, entities and utterances, and other parameters used by a virtual assistant.

Ultimately, the technology provided the City of Sydney with the perfect combination of power, flexibility, and simplicity.

The City of Sydney has seen up to 50% improvement in click-through rates to its online services and up to 25% improvement in measures of the time and effort it takes customers to accomplish what they have to do, meaning they are spending less time clicking and more time enjoying the city.

The content team has observed a positive shift away from the old create-a-page mindset to more specific department requests, rather than flattened page structures that ultimately lead to muddled organization and duplication.

Content authors have also found the blend of flexibility and simplicity through the component library to be liberating, allowing them to deliver far richer and more useful experiences with less effort than ever before. Pre-set page templates exist for everyday items, and an extensive suite of components offers new possibilities for the future.

With Sitecore technology, the City of Sydney has set a new standard for a government site with a distinct and effective approach to site architecture.