Building Commission NSW (BCNSW) is the state's first dedicated regulator of the building industry. The Office of the Building Commissioner was detached from NSW Fair Trading, with the aim of giving a clear focus on the building sector.
BCNSW's role is to enforce quality standards and ensure builders and new homes are compliant, safe and durable.
Migration goals
As the state’s first building regulator, Building Commission NSW (BCNSW) required a digital presence to establish its authority and reinforce its regulatory role. Clear messaging and accessible resources were essential to build public trust in the construction industry.
To improve customer experience, the goal was to provide easily navigable information and access to self-service resources. These enhancements would reduce enquiries and complaints, resulting in significant time savings for frontline staff.
Challenges
The existing content sat on the NSW Fair Trading website. Decoupling the information called for cross-agency collaboration to show clear lines of ownership. We supported this with a tailored change management plan.
The content was lengthy and difficult to navigate. Key information was inaccessible, buried at the bottom of long pages or hidden in fact sheets.
Additionally, the content lacked targeted customer segmentation. This did not distinguish between the needs of tradespeople, customers and industry stakeholders. This caused confusion, leading to a high volume of enquiries. We needed to resolve this and deliver a clear, consistent, and customer-focused experience.
Collaboration
To achieve this, we needed to develop a strong partnership with the 13-strong BCNSW team. We set up a cross-portfolio team including Service NSW and Department of Customer Service (DCS) Digital Communications.
We created customer-centric user journeys, to keep our focus on the customer. Over the course of the project, a team of subject matter experts reviewed over 500 pages of information.
This collaboration helped BCNSW establish its own identity and digital footprint.
Approach
Alongside the user journeys, we segmented information into different pillars. This improved navigation, making information accessible and tailored. The pillars are:
- Licensing and qualifications
- Certifiers
- Strata Building Bonds Inspection Scheme
- Construction and trade essentials
- Building and renovating.
Where information required an action, we included cross-links. These help to complete the customer journey. For example, information on professional requirements linked to licencing and registration information.
Customer impact
The BCNSW migration delivered modern, customer-focused webpages on nsw.gov.au. This asset helps to position them as a standalone regulator.
The customer experience improvements include:
- a resource hub to help the building and construction industry adapt to reforms and deliver quality building work.
- a new Register of building work orders page was built as a resource finder. This included a keyword search and filter function. This makes it easier for customers to find information for over 100 BCNSW work orders.
- a simplified Licensing and registration applications process, previously spread across 50+ pages.
- clearer pathways to Service NSW transactions.
- a consistent, brand-aligned design. This makes content easier to scan, search and act upon.
- accessibility tools including language translation and text read-aloud.
As a result of this work:
- accessibility score improved to 94.7% (+6.6%)
- reduced total number of pages from 462 to 257 (-44%)
- reduced 1,273 to 707 accessible PDFs (-55%)
- reduced reading age from 15.7 to 11
- quality assurance score improved to 92.9% across all pages (an uplift of + 51%)
- digital certainty index reached 93% (+17%)
Agency efficiencies achieved, include:
- more self-service options upfront, to reduce the number of complaints
- efficient upload of work orders, within agreed timelines.
These results show how strong collaboration can create positive impact, for people of NSW, businesses and public sector.
Agency experience
Overall, the collaboration scored an average of 86% for agency satisfaction. The last 2 pillars (Building and Renovating, Construction and Trade) scored 100% each. Feedback received from the agency:
“OneCX are working to government standards for webpages so there were no shortcuts taken and everything was of the highest quality.”
“The team have been very professional, very responsive, meeting challenging timelines, producing high quality content (web pages), working really well with the business SMEs and implementing changes requested by the SMEs super quickly, sometimes within hours.”
Aligning with the NSW Digital Strategy to support the local economy and drive productivity, this collaboration shows what can be achieved when agencies work together with a shared vision: to provide clear, accessible and high-quality information for the people of New South Wales.