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NLGCSN Customer Experience Benchmark

Your FY2025/26 benchmark report

A sample benchmarking report for a fictional council, read against an illustrative cohort of ten fictional councils. It is exactly what a participating council receives: eleven sections, four moves, and the basis of every figure.

Cycle FY2025/26Your return SubmittedIllustrative cohort 10 fictional councilsPopulation 24,800Team 8.6 FTEService centres 2
Published 29 September 2026, sample in the second edition format · about 25 minutes at a full read · confidential to Wattlebridge Shire Council and the program team
How to read it
  • Positions are shown against the spread of the cohort: your figure, the cohort middle and the range. There are no ranks, no averages and no league table.
  • No other council is named against any figure. Where fewer than ten could answer a question, the count is stated beside the comparison.
  • Any figure with a dotted underline opens its basis, the cohort’s spread and your own note on it.
  • The moves section reports what your return opened up, not what you must do. Each one names what the benchmark could not see.

What this year shows

This report comes out of the NLGCSN Customer Experience Benchmark pilot: ten councils measuring the same year, FY2025/26, through the same return, from the demand each carried and what it cost to answer, to the team behind the service and a self-assessment of maturity against a shared model. The aim is a clear, private reading of each operation beside its peers: what the year shows, what it opened up, and the baseline the next cycle will be read against. This is yours.

In brief

What we found

  1. 1Your community reaches its council more than any other in this cohort: , more than double the cohort middle, and about two phone calls a year for every person in the shire.
  2. 2A small team carries it at , but the load shows on the phones: a service level of within 60 seconds against your own target of 80.
  3. 3You are one of five councils that hear from customers after the job is done, with this year, and one of five that can time their inbox.

What it means for you

Nothing in this return points at effort. The team handles the heaviest load per person in the cohort for the least money per contact, and the phones get whoever is not on the counter, at Marralong or in the inbox. The strain sits in the machinery around the team, above all a request system with no connection to anything else, so every request is typed by hand. The start from figures you already hold.

Worth considering

  • 1Finding out how much of each call is typing, since every minute of handle time is 800 hours a year.
  • 2Reading the half-hours where the service level is lost, from the phone data you already collect.
  • 3Counting the calls that chase a request already logged, which the survey and the phone platform can both see.
  • 4Treating the survey's unhappy quarter as the shortlist for what to fix first.

Eight numbers carry the year.

What is working
Cost per contact$11.21Lowest in the cohortA reported $846,300 spread across 75,500 contacts.
Customers surveyed1,626One of five councils listeningResponses after a closed request, 73.7 per cent of them satisfied.
Email response2.8 daysOne of five councils timing emailInside your own five-day standard, with 81 per cent answered within it.
Frontline load9,934Contacts per person, the heaviest hereCarried by 7.6 frontline FTE across two counters, the inbox and the phones.
What the year raises
Contacts per resident3.0More than double the cohort middleA demand fact, not a performance one: a community that calls its council.
Phone service level68%Against your own target of 80Answered within 60 seconds, in the first full year on the new phone platform.
Average handle time5:24Second longest of tenIncluding the time spent typing each request into the request system.
Counter waitNot measuredNo queue system at either counterYour own target is ten minutes; nothing yet records the wait.

Your community talks to its council. Phone carries , the inbox , the counters , and nothing at all arrives through webchat or a portal. Per resident that is , and per rateable property , both the highest in the cohort by a distance. A shire of 24,800 people made 48,000 phone calls to its council this year, and that is the fact every other figure in this report sits on.

The team that answers them is small and lean. is the heaviest load in the group, and is the lowest cost. The queue shows where that meets its limit: answered inside your 60-second threshold against a target of 80, an average wait of , and of callers hanging up. The phones are not short of effort. They are short of people at the moments the counter, Marralong and the inbox all need someone too.

Your return measures the customer as well as the queue. You survey customers after a request is closed, you time the inbox against a standard, and your maturity answers on measurement and on complaints sit level with the cohort middle. That is rarer than it sounds: only five councils here can say what their customers thought, and only five can say how fast they answer email.

Everything above is developed in the sections that follow. The report's limits are in and every figure's basis in .