QLDC reveals plan to address poor community trust

Following the low trust scores achieved in their recent Community Insights survey the Queenstown Lakes District Council has disclosed their plan to tackle the issue.

The council's trust and confidence level was down at 17%, but with around 50% of the results removed as being "too negative." Those respondents, who were not directly invited to take part, returned a trust rating of just 4%.

Councillors and staff have acknowledged the need for change, in particular around the area of communications.

However, the council response is focussed on "customer-centric" staff training rather than any direct change in the way council activities are reported to the community and media.

The following statment was released to Crux this afternoon (July 7, 2025.)

"As part of our dedication to enhancing how Council communicates, interacts, and delivers exceptional service to our community, QLDC is developing a training programme for existing and new employees that will emphasise customer-centric behaviours, ultimately helping to build trust and confidence with our customers."

"Mandatory workshops will be held for all employees. In future, the delivery of this training will be provided internally, and evolve to become part of QLDC’s continuous improvement journey."

"Colab Training & Development was appointed to lead this work through an open market process on GETS. QLDC is now working through the discovery phase of the training programme with them."

"QLDC cannot comment on costs of this programme of work on the grounds of not prejudicing Colab’s commercial position, as per LGOIMA s7(2)(b)(ii))."

This is the project specification as published on the GETS government tender platform - placed on Monday February 17 2025 and closed on March 14 2025, before the trust and confidence survey had taken place.

"Queenstown Lakes District Council is seeking proposals from qualified providers to deliver a comprehensive solution for measuring customer satisfaction and providing actionable insights across multiple council-provided services (“the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Measurement and Reporting Solution” or “CSAT Solution”).

This project involves three key components:

1. Advice to QLDC on the appropriate design of the CSAT Solution (Customer Satisfaction Measurement/Reporting), specifically with regards to:

· appropriate measures for different types of council services, such as Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT), Net Promotor Scores (NPS) and Customer Effort Scores

· measurement type and frequency, specifically advising the most effective use of point of service surveys, user surveys and broad satisfaction surveys

· potential benchmarking opportunities

· reporting – with an emphasis on actionable insights

2. The provision of the measurement and reporting tools and technologies (such as the ability to trigger point of service surveys)

3. The management and execution of the surveys.

"The successful provider(s) will demonstrate expertise in framework design, satisfaction measurement, data analysis, and actionable reporting tailored to diverse stakeholder audiences.

"QLDC is looking for the provider to show innovation in the design and delivery of the CSAT Solution, using digital solutions where appropriate. We are looking for insights that enable us to robustly measure customer satisfaction, identify insights that can drive accountability for performance at an appropriately granular level and enable us to target areas for improvement.

"What we are not looking for is a broad ‘residents and ratepayers’ satisfaction survey that means respondents may not have used the council service or facility, don’t provide detailed enough measures, and frequency does not enable effective trend reporting and intervention."

Source: QLDC post on GETS government tender platform.