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Case study · Service design · Service NSW

Service NSW: what one front door for government did and did not fix

By BREME · · 6 minute read

In short

Service NSW gave people one place to deal with dozens of NSW agencies: shopfronts, a 24/7 phone line, a website and an app. Its annual reports show customer satisfaction of 98% in its first full year and 94.4% in 2024-25. But auditors and the Ombudsman found problems where data, money and decisions passed between Service NSW and the agencies behind it. A front door improves the experience only as far as the back office lets it.

Who this is for: CX leads, operations managers and executives in any organisation where several teams, systems or partners touch the same customer, from multi-site clinics and membership bodies to banks, insurers and government agencies.

The problem: government organised around agencies, not people

Service NSW was set up so that people could reach many NSW Government agencies through one place, rather than finding the right agency for each task. Its authorising law, the Service NSW (One-stop Access to Government Services) Act 2013, came into effect on 21 June 2013, and the 2024-25 annual report says its primary purpose is to facilitate one-stop access to government services.

The 2013-14 annual report describes the mission plainly: to make it easier for citizens to do business with government. The Customer Service Commissioner at the time framed the work as part of rebuilding citizens' trust in how government delivers services.

What changed in the journey

The core design move was a single front door. The customer deals with Service NSW; the agency that owns the policy stays behind it. In its first full year, 2013-14, Service NSW opened 18 service centres with extended hours, ran a 24/7 phone line answered by a real person based in NSW, and offered more than 800 transactions on behalf of agencies including Roads and Maritime Services, Fair Trading and the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. It reported serving more than 3.5 million customers that year, with average waits under seven minutes and satisfaction of 98%.

Over the following years the front door was extended in ways that matter to anyone designing a journey across teams:

  • Tell us once. In 2019-20, MyServiceNSW Account changes added 'Tell Us Once' features for 13 services, so customers could prove their identity once and reuse it.
  • A digital licence. The NSW Digital Driver Licence went statewide in October 2019. By 30 June 2020, more than 1.57 million drivers, over 28% of licence holders, had one.
  • Bundles built around a situation. The Savings Finder (formerly Cost of Living) brings more than 80 NSW Government rebates and savings programs into one place. In 2024-25 it supported 23,383 completed appointments, with an average saving of $579 per customer and 99% satisfaction. In 2020, a COVID-19 Assistance Finder pulled together health, food, housing, employment and financial support for people whose circumstances had suddenly changed.
  • Shared identity and tracking. By 2024-25, a federated login let customers use one MyServiceNSW Account for multiple NSW Government services, and customers could track grant and rebate applications in their account, which the report says reduced Contact Centre calls.
  • Flexible frontline. Under an integrated frontline model, regional Service Centre staff handled more than 142,000 additional calls during quieter periods in 2024-25.

What it measures and publishes

Service NSW publishes customer satisfaction by channel every year. That alone is useful practice. In 2024-25 the figures were 98.02% for Service Centres, 93.74% for Contact Centres and 85.7% for the digital channel. More than 3 million customers gave feedback, with an average satisfaction score of 94.4%, slightly down from 96.1% in 2023-24.

The channel gap is worth noticing. In 2019-20 the report gave website satisfaction as 98%. In 2024-25 the Service NSW website was at 85.7%. The report does not say whether the measure changed, so we would treat the comparison with care, but the face-to-face channel now scores well above digital.

It also reports a measure many organisations skip: trust. In 2024-25, 77% of customers said they trust Service NSW, against a target of 90%. Staff engagement was 64%, below its 77% target, which the report links to a restructure and workforce reductions under Program Realign.

Complaints are reported openly too. Service NSW received 14,274 complaints in 2024-25, up about 15% on the previous year, and 239 escalations from the NSW Ombudsman. A further 2,489 complaints were about partner agency policies or processes and were referred to those agencies. That last number is the front door model in miniature: the customer complains to the counter they can see, about a rule set somewhere they cannot.

What auditors and the Ombudsman found

The criticisms cluster at the handovers between Service NSW and the agencies behind it.

In December 2020, the Audit Office of NSW found that Service NSW was not effectively handling personal customer and business information to ensure its privacy. The audit followed a 2020 breach in which phishing gave attackers access to 47 staff email accounts. Service NSW initially reported about 186,000 affected residents. The audit found that routinely emailing customer information to client agencies contributed to the breach, that responsibilities for privacy between Service NSW and client agencies were unclear, and that individuals may not know which agency to complain to. It said rapid growth had outpaced the development of controls, and made eight recommendations. By 2024-25, multi-factor authentication was mandatory for all accounts, and MFA-enabled accounts had grown from 887,000 to 1.5 million.

In June 2021, the Audit Office found Service NSW paid COVID-19 small business grants promptly and in line with eligibility rules, and that 99% of applicants who responded gave a thumbs up. It also found that tight timeframes led to gaps in project and risk management.

In 2024, the NSW Government said about $144 million in merchant fees had been unlawfully charged on 92 million transactions since 2016 across Service NSW and Revenue NSW, AAP reported. The 2024-25 annual report says the charging was stopped by mid-November 2024 and referred to the NSW Ombudsman, whose inquiry was ongoing at the time of the report.

In April 2026, the NSW Ombudsman reported on the compliance audit program for COVID-19 business grants run by Service NSW and Revenue NSW. It found a failure to develop a comprehensive audit framework before audits began, and a failure to apply policies consistently, which led to inequitable outcomes. It made seven recommendations, including that Service NSW review certain groups of auditees to identify debts that should be waived.

Lessons for any organisation with many teams touching one customer

Few organisations run a state government shopfront. But many have the same shape: one customer, a front line that faces them, and several teams or partners behind it who own the rules. Service NSW's public record offers six lessons.

  • One front door helps, but it does not fix the rooms behind it. Count the complaints your front line receives about decisions it does not own, and route them back to the owner with a deadline.
  • Write down who is accountable at every handover of data or money. The Audit Office's privacy findings were about unclear responsibility between Service NSW and its partners, not about the counter.
  • Tell us once needs shared plumbing. Reusing a customer's identity or details across teams depends on a shared account and agreed data exchange, not just a promise on the website.
  • Design around situations, not departments. Savings Finder and the Assistance Finder start from what is happening in the customer's life and gather the help from many owners.
  • Report satisfaction by channel and watch the gap. A strong average can hide a channel that is drifting.
  • Measure trust separately from satisfaction. Service NSW's satisfaction sits in the 90s, while its own trust measure was 13 points under target in 2024-25. People can be happy with a transaction and still unsure about the institution.

Where we would start

If your organisation has a single entry point and several teams behind it, put one real customer journey on the wall, from first contact to final outcome, and mark every point where the customer, their data or their money passes from one team to another. For each handover, ask three questions: who owns it, how does the customer know what happens next, and what happens when it goes wrong? Service NSW's record suggests that is where both the wins and the problems live.

Sources

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