Page 1834 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 22 June 2021
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We were not able to relaunch the website separately for businesses and customers—that is, the website was not able to go live first for businesses and then for customers. This also factored into our reasoning for a 7 am Friday start, as it would provide the majority of businesses with time to come back online and gain confidence that the website was working.
We understood there would be nervousness in both the business and broader Canberra community about the website given the technical experience previously. In our communication to customers, we stressed that it would be up to businesses to determine when they would start redeeming vouchers. We wanted to underline this so expectations were managed and so businesses would have time, if they needed, to become more comfortable with the scheme. It also took into account that businesses open at different hours and customers should not have expected that all businesses would be accepting vouchers at 7 am.
The website was monitored closely. I am pleased to say it consistently performed strongly. We saw that redemptions began well, with about $30,000 being redeemed in the first hour. As the day progressed, we were seeing redemptions at over $70,000 an hour. With the amount of vouchers being claimed available in the form of a ticker for all businesses and customers and being updated in real time, those logged in could observe that the take up was large and that it was increasing.
Combined with increasing confidence in the website and consumers and businesses having a smooth and straightforward experience, this meant the redemption rates appear to have had the effect of creating more demand—in a sense, a compounding effect. I acknowledge that the speed at which vouchers were claimed was extraordinary and, in turn, created its own frustrations when all vouchers were redeemed a little after 8 am on Saturday, 19 June.
I appreciate that there is commentary that some consumers and businesses would have liked to have seen the spread over at least a slightly longer period of time, and that is my personal view, too. However, we were consistently clear that there was $2 million to be spent, and it would be available until it was spent.
In redesigning the scheme, we wanted to create demand to ensure all the available funding was spent and to avoid what we had seen during the trial, where not all funds were expended. We wanted to ensure that the funding would flow to businesses, and that meant ensuring the scheme was attractive and popular to consumers. When the vouchers were available, we emailed registered consumers the evening before and sent out a text message to all registered consumers on the day to ensure there was wide awareness that the scheme was resuming.
To assist with consumers and businesses re-engaging with the program we ensured that Access Canberra was available from when the website reopened at 7 am, and they readily took calls throughout the day, mostly related to password resets. The average wait time was one minute. Once customers logged in, the ticker provided transparency so that customers could make informed and up-to-date decisions on when to make their purchases. We updated the text below the ticker during the day to inform
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