The refreshed Customer Experience Strategy builds on previous work and lessons learned. It helps the Town move toward a more consistent and coordinated approach to service across all departments.
By looking at the full customer journey from first contact to final outcome, the Town can improve how services are delivered. This includes simplifying processes, reducing wait times, improving accessibility, and making sure staff are accountable for follow‑through.
A positive customer experience is a simple one. People can find what they need, understand what will happen next, and feel supported until their request or issue is resolved. This strategy helps turn those expectations into everyday practice.
The Connect. Support. Deliver. model reflects how people actually experience Town services. Instead of seeing service as a single transaction, the model recognizes that customer experience is made up of several moments over time.
These moments are shaped by how staff interact with customers, how clearly information is shared, and how reliably the Town follows through.
The model recognizes three key elements of a positive service experience:
Together, these elements help align staff actions with customer expectations and create a shared way of working across the organization.
Customer experience is shared responsibility across the organization. It focuses on how people feel throughout their full interaction with the Town, from start to finish. The approach is proactive and designed around the whole customer journey. It aims to reduce confusion, prevent problems, and make services easier to use.
Customer service, by contrast, is what individual teams deliver in the moment — reactive, problem‑solving, and essential to day‑to‑day satisfaction.
Together, customer service and customer experience create the everyday moments that build trust over time.
Six guiding principles anchor the strategy and shape how service is expected to be delivered consistently across the Town:
The strategy is built around four strategic pillars. These pillars are based on feedback from staff, customers, service data, and best practices.
Together, they guide the Town in making services:
Each pillar includes two areas of focus to support meaningful improvements and ensure every interaction is an opportunity to connect with empathy, support with clarity, and deliver with consistency.
Continue expanding the centralized model (ServiceOakville) to eliminate silos and reduce hand-offs, including by integrating customer service representatives into departments for seamless customer follow-up and reporting.
Introduce more automated self-service tools integrated with the town’s customer relationship management system (CRM) and explore AI opportunities.
Enable customers to track service requests and receive updates automatically, through AI-powered CRM features and/or through staff-initiated interactions.
Provide multilingual, mobile-optimized, and plain-language service tools.
Define and report on standards and resolution benchmarks organization-wide.
Expand use of real-time feedback, such as post-interaction surveys, and analyze trended results to identify opportunities for improvement.
Strengthen CX leadership through the Communications and CX department, which will set Town‑wide standards, track performance, lead CX initiatives, support training, and represent customer needs at senior leadership and Council.
Build staff capability through consistent, organization‑wide training on empathy, clarity, accountability, resilience, and first‑contact resolution.
Corporate service standards establish a shared understanding of what service excellence looks like across the organization. Grounded in feedback from the public and staff, the following proposed standards reflect the Town’s values and set clear expectations for quality, responsiveness, accessibility and follow-through across the organization:
We'll review and revise these proposed standards as we move through our strategy implementation and mature in our customer experience culture shift. We already have several methods of measuring success in place, including customer satisfaction measures, response times and digital usability insights. We know there are still gaps and we'll continue to develop and strength our measurement tools and methods in order to improve customer experience across our organization.
Five key actions that will help bring the strategy to life:
Tied to the four pillars, the following actions and outcomes will help drive the Customer Experience culture throughout the Town over the next several years.
Share your feedback or ideas on how we can improve the Customer Experience.
The Town’s 2026 Community Satisfaction Survey shows a strong foundation: 82 per cent of residents are satisfied with their local government, and 90 per cent are satisfied with the quality of Town services, well above national benchmarks. At the same time, residents told us that expanding and improving online services, including ways to easily check or receive updates on the status of their online service requests, are clear opportunities for improvement.
While satisfaction is high and staff are deeply committed to serving the community, good intentions alone are not enough. Without a modern strategy and clear accountability, service efforts can become siloed and inconsistent, leading to repeat issues, slower resolution, increased complaints to Council, and hidden costs for the Town.
The new strategy will help ensure that all touchpoints the public has with the Town are positive, seamless, efficient, and user friendly, whether interacting with Town staff in-person out in the community or at a facility, doing a transaction online, or calling ServiceOakville.
When customers use Town services or interact with Town staff, many factors can result in either a good or bad customer experience. By understanding where problems lie across the end-to-end journey, we can identify opportunities to improve the customers’ perception and feelings of their experience, as well as their trust in the Town.
Engagement was conducted from May through July 2025. A total of 500 participants shared their insights related to customer experience through the following methods:
Customers expressed a high level of confidence in ServiceOakville, highlighting positive contact‑centre performance and growing use of digital channels. At the same time, they also identified challenges, including inconsistent experiences across departments, limited follow‑up, and unclear service pathways.
ServiceOakville
905-845-6601
ServiceOakville
905-845-6601
