How the Shire of Northam slashed service response times and won back community trust

Administrative burden used to get in the way of customer care. Now, with rich report data routing directly to field teams and updates firing back to residents, Northam’s customer satisfaction scores are at an all-time high of 88%.

The Challenge

When a customer reported a damaged park asset or a stray animal to the Shire of Northam last year, here's what happened next: it would take three to four days for the report to get to the responsible officer who could resolve it, and once they did, no one would let the customer know.

That wasn't for lack of effort. The team was manually fielding requests, then entering the data into both their CRM for customer record keeping and, at times, a spreadsheet for allocating jobs to field teams.

“There was a lot of double-handling, even triple-handling, just to get the report to the person who could action it.”
– Tamika Van Beek, Manager of Administration Engineering Services at the Shire of Northam.

That pre-work alone cost the Shire roughly 10 hours of staff time a week, some $18,200 a year, says Alysha McCall, Manager of Governance and Risk at the Western Australian local government, which services a population of 13,000.

Exacerbating the issue was that the reports didn't always carry the information crews needed to act on them. With the Shire covering 1,430 square kilometres across a mostly rural, sheep- and grain-farming area, reports that arrived without a precise location or photo were difficult to resolve. Sometimes, the Officer needed to phone the customer with follow-up questions. At other times, crews wasted long trips out to inspect or rectify an issue they simply couldn't find.

Once a job did get done, the task was manually closed out twice – once in the CRM and once in the spreadsheet. That’s if it got closed off at all; sometimes the administrative burden was too much to manage. Either way, the customer never found out their request had been addressed.

“We struggled to close the loop with customers because it was a manual task that took up a lot of staff resources. There was no automation; it was all manual logging and manual communication.”
– Tamika Van Beek, who led the Snap Send Solve implementation.

The Solution

The Shire needed a mobile-first request management system that would digitise their workflows, streamline processes to ease the administrative burden on staff, and improve communication with the community.

They identified that a third of customer requests, roughly 70 per month, were already coming through Snap Send Solve, and that the majority of the Shire’s website visitors were using mobile devices. In light of this, the Shire decided to double down on the app the community was already using.

Today, Northam customers make requests for service through the Snap Send Solve app or webform. They simply snap a photo of the issue and add a short description. Then, Snap Send Solve takes their precise location from the photo, draws on AI to suggest the correct incident type, and automatically notifies the team that’s best equipped to solve it.

Now, 94% of all reports sent to Northam via the app contain at least one photo with a precise location.

“A lot of our issues came from not getting quality reports. Say someone reported rubbish in a park and a crew couldn’t find the specific pile, we then risked reputational damage. We said, ‘We can't do anything,’ but the rubbish was still sitting there and the person who reported it got frustrated that we weren’t fixing it. With a photo and precise location, we're now able to find that exact pile of rubbish and deal with it accordingly.”
– Tamika Van Beek

Communication has also transformed. Every time a report’s status is updated in the Snap Send Solve portal – be that by an administrator, officer or coordinator – they simply select a templated message to fire back to the customer, keeping them in the loop at every step of the way with accurate and informative updates.

“Staff members who were selected as champions for their areas worked together to develop our communication templates by identifying the generic, professional information we wanted to provide, and how we wanted it worded to the community.”
– Tamika Van Beek

The Shire also found a way to accommodate the 22% of its residents who don't have internet access. When someone phones or walks in, a staff member submits the report through the Snap Send Solve webform on their behalf, which means every report ends up in the same request management system, regardless of how the customer chose to deliver it.

The Result

With automated request routing and better quality reports, it now takes the Shire only three days to resolve customer requests in August, down from 24 days in March. 

“The Enterprise subscription pays for itself in reduced admin resourcing costs.”
– Alysha McCall

Customer satisfaction has also seen a massive uplift, with CSAT scores rising from 61% to 88% over the same period. The team attributes this primarily to communication; residents now feel heard. The data backs this up. In August 2025, customers scored Northam 40% for communication. A year later, it was more than double, at 84%.

That improvement in community sentiment is showing on social media. Before, a frustrated resident venting on a local Facebook group would draw a pile-on of others adding their own complaints. Now, complaints referencing unresolved requests have significantly declined, and when some do appear, the threads look different; residents ask, “Have you put it through Snap Send Solve? Mine are always solved.”

“We've got advocates in the community now that we didn't have before.”
– Victoria Williams, Manager of Engagement and Communications, Shire of Northam 

Make a report to the Shire of Northam today, and the customer experience feels nothing like it did last year. The report is assigned instantly. A crew turns up at the right place with the right equipment the first time. And when it's resolved, the customer who reported it finds out.

“At the end of the day, we're here to deliver a service efficiently to the community. My advice to other local governments is to start with an inwards focus – challenge what you're doing, ask, ‘Is this adding value?’ – and build a culture of continuous improvement.”
– Alysha McCall, Manager of Governance and Risk