A tailored content delivery experience currently supporting over 500,000 users and 90,000 disputes per year
Built in Drupal 9
2021 Australian Web Award Finalist
VCAT went to market seeking a partner to deliver their new Drupal 8 website to replace their ageing and poorly maintained existing Drupal platform.
The VCAT website redesign project aimed to make it easier and more convenient for customers to access their services online. By improving the user experience, and transitioning the website into a transactional, self-service channel, the project would deliver positive business outcomes through reduced call volumes, customer call backs and process delays.
Part of Court Services Victoria, The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) resolves legal disputes and cases in Victoria. VCAT is the busiest tribunal in Australia resolving approximately 90,000 annual disputes, with approximately 500,000 visitors per year.
VCAT was eager to engage a delivery partner who could meet their needs for technology leadership and Agile delivery management, embedded within their on-site product development team.
It would take a unified team approach to ensure:
Greater self-service and support to users; better manage user expectations of processes, fees, time to hearing, requirements
Create easier, faster application pathways through coordinating consistent communication across the user journey
Build a scalable system where functionality can be built iteratively and for new jurisdictions
Reduce in-bound telephone and email enquiries, process delays and error handling
Increase search engine discoverability and improve accessibility for all users
Managing through COVID
With a growing backlog, fixed budget and the distribution of business from COVID meant a strict project methodology had to be introduced to manage the launch scope, and ensure the embedded approach continued at high velocity.
Users being able to self-service and find their particular information across the array of case-types that VCAT presides over. With varying stages in the dispute resolution journey that users can enter VCAT through meant the solution needed to be flexible, and present a vast amount of information and in a variety of contexts.
VCAT’s solution provides their 500,000+ yearly visitors with an intuitive experience to easily find the information they need to assist whether they are seeking to apply to take a case to VCAT or are brought in to resolve a dispute.
Building an intuitive framework for content managers was a primary project objective. The solution had to support a large number of content administrators tasked with managing the breadth of content that is available across the matrix of case and application types.
Powering the solution, and ensuring it reaches all of the 500k+ visitors whenever they need it is a custom Drupal 8 CMS, deployed on our High Availability and secure containerised infrastructure. The modern infrastructure auto-scales to meet demand, and feature developments and security updates can be deployed with zero downtime.
The Results
By improving the user experience, and transitioning the website into a transactional, self-service channel, the project delivered positive business outcomes through reduced call volumes, customer call backs and process delays.
Built on Drupal 8 and hosted on our high availability AWS cluster, the VCAT website provides a scalable system where functionality can be built iteratively and for new jurisdictions.
Widely adopted internally, the website has been considered a huge success and pivotal to VCAT’s digital transformation.
Improved online service delivery with faster application pathways through coordinating consistent communication across all user types
Developed on a Drupal 8 architecture that empowered their web services team to build and deploy highly customisable web components and pages
We reduced in-bound customer services calls and in person enquiry, process delays and court application errors
Dedicated videos and case studies for the Koori community
Improved accessibility for people living with disability and low-literacy. Designed to work with voice
