What is Business Connect?
Business Connect is a cross-agency digital services platform that provides one place for businesses to deal with government. It’s a front-end solution that gives businesses a consistent and coordinated experience of central and local government with features that help to save them time and effort.
Business Connect’s purpose is to provide a digital channel to reduce the administrative cost involved for businesses to deal with government, increase business productivity and wellbeing by enabling people to spend less time dealing with government and improve the transparency and trust in government services, leading to improved compliance with regulatory outcomes.
What are the benefits of using Business Connect?
- A more standardised experience to business no matter where they are in New Zealand;
- Advantages to businesses who cross council boundaries;
- A guided experience to help businesses feel confident that they are getting it right the first time;
- Removing a barrier for new businesses to start up by increasing confidence;
- Reusing information where possible so businesses don’t have to keep repeating themselves.
Community benefits
Benefits of adopting the Business Connect platform to our district’s community:
It provides time savings for business:
- When applying for council services.
- Year on year for renewals as information is prepopulated.
- As premises across council boundaries get a consistent experience when applying for licences and permits.
It’s a user-friendly online experience:
- The platform has a smart design.
- The services’ design increases compliance the first time around resulting in quicker processing times benefiting business and the council.
It increases customer satisfaction:
- Local businesses have a digital option for applying for their licences and permits in one place that reuses their data, is easy to use and provides notifications when it’s time to renew their application resulting in reduced frustration.
- Businesses experience increased confidence in understanding the process and what they are being asked to do.
Organisational benefits
Benefits of adopting the Business Connect platform to our organisation:
It will contribute to the council’s digital and sustainability strategies:
- Business Connect offers a range of online services for our business customers that continues to grow.
- Online applications save paper and time spent printing and scanning paper applications.
It is a cost effective and responsive solution:
- Adopting Business Connect services is quick and can be made rapidly available to our business customers.
- Enhancements to the platform and changes to our service requirements can be handled quickly and easily.
- The council is not responsible for ongoing maintenance costs.
It enables quicker processing and better compliance:
- Business Connect’s smart design means that applications are fully completed and easy to understand resulting in better compliance and less back and forth with the customer.
- Increased business customer satisfaction.
- The platform’s local government services comply with legislation and can be adapted where required.
It’s an opportunity for our council to lead the way:
- By adopting Business Connect services we can lead the way in providing businesses with a more consistent and standardised experience when interacting with government to save them time and money.
- Councils using Business Connect have influence over how services are designed and what services are built next for local government.
- Regular user-groups give councils a voice and offer them an opportunity to come together to share experiences, feedback and suggestions on how it make the platform better.