Cessnock City Council
Cessnock City Council improves customer experience with intuitive and secure data capture solution.
Located 120kms north of Sydney, and 40 kilometres west of Newcastle, the Cessnock LGA covers almost 2,000 square kilometres and has a population of over 69,500 residents. A beautiful and picturesque region, it encompasses one of Australia’s most famous and oldest wine producing areas – the Hunter Valley.
Cessnock City Council aims to provide efficient and effective customer service as defined in the Customer Service Charter.

Problem
Cessnock City Council’s IT team is small and the resources to create and manage an integrated custom solution were not available.
Cessnock City Council captured customer requests using forms on their website, but users found the existing platform difficult to use. There were also concerns about the platform’s data security and that it might be configured to accidentally expose customer data
Solution
CIBIS provided Cessnock City Council with its Formlify enterprise form building solution including Authority and Content Manager integration. Formlify provides complete control over layout enabling staff to create more intuitive forms for users. Formlify’s Authority integration is highly customisable making configuration between Council’s Authority CRM and Registers simple. It is also secure as all communication is done via CIBIS’ encrypted middleware. Formlify forms are SaaS based and thus remove the overhead of Council having to maintain another platform. As a purpose-built enterprise product, Formlify contains many features not found in CMS-based form builders and allows simple implementation of formulas and workflow logic without coding as well as host of other features.
Outcome
Cessnock City Council’s move to Formlify has provided customers with a more intuitive and friendly data capture experience. Cessnock no longer needs to worry about accidental exposure of customer information and has complete control over how captured data is stored within their Civica Authority and Content Manager platforms.
Council IT staff benefit from not having to manage and support an internal forms solution.
"Our existing forms were clunky and difficult to use. We were also concerned about accidentally exposing customer data. The move to Formlify was primarily about improving the customer experience.
Having worked with CIBIS previously, we knew that they could deliver a solution with minimal hassle. Our staff are happy because they’ve got one less system to deal with and can just get on with helping our residents."
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