Background
As Australia’s national workplace relations tribunal, the Fair Work Commission (FWC) plays a critical role in resolving disputes and upholding fair workplace standards. However, its conciliation services particularly for unfair dismissal cases were constrained by fragmented legacy systems and manual processes. Citizens faced inconsistent experiences, and staff struggled with inefficiencies that hindered service delivery.
FWC set a bold vision: to enable users to “Start Online, Stay Online.” This meant creating a seamless, secure, and intuitive digital experience that empowered individuals to engage with the Commission on their own terms.
Challenge
FWC’s existing conciliation process relied on many tools including Microsoft Bookings, SharePoint, and Virtual Appointments. While these provided short-term relief, they placed strain on ICT resources and frontline teams. The scheduling and management of conciliation sessions were long, error-prone, and lacked integration, impacting both staff efficiency and user experience.
Through strategic and technical discovery sessions, FWC identified two core pain points:
External User Experience: Citizens expected to engage with the Commission through a single, secure online location like their experience with other public and private services.
Internal Efficiency: Staff needed upstream efficiencies to reduce duplicative manual data entry, improve accuracy, and streamline service delivery.
FWC engaged Exco Partners to help ideate and deliver a future-ready solution that would address these challenges across four key stages, starting with a proof of concept and culminating in a fully integrated customer portal.
Approach
Exco Partners applied a structured, human-centred design methodology across three key phases:
Discovery & Proof of Concept: Co-design workshops and technical assessments helped define a future-ready architecture using Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.
Platform Development: Agile delivery teams built and validated core components including case routing, agent interface, and AI-powered workflows.
Customer Portal Integration: A full-service portal designed to support diverse user groups from first-time applicants to legal professionals enabling secure, end-to-end digital engagement.
To accelerate delivery and ensure scalability, Exco leveraged its suite of modular accelerators, including:
Complex Case Management
Digital Service Design
Cloud-native delivery frameworks
Portfolio Governance
These accelerators, aligned to Microsoft’s technology blueprint, enabled rapid prototyping, reusable components, and consistent delivery across phases. Built on standard cloud technologies, the framework supports customizable workflows, AI-driven models, secure identity management, and omni-channel communication.
Exco Partners has been deploying these accelerators across other agencies, demonstrating their broad applicability and proven success.
Solution:
The Dynamics 365 Customer Service Application was the heart of the Complex Case Management Solution, which is now fully operational, marking a major milestone in FWC’s digital transformation. Key features include:
AI-Powered Case Routing: Using Copilot Studio, incoming cases are intelligently categorized and assigned based on type, priority, history, and agent ability.
Unified Agent Interface: All customer interactions are consolidated into a single view, improving response times and service quality.
Advanced Analytics & Reporting: Supervisors can monitor performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize service delivery in real time.
Customer Portal: A web based digital portal, integrated with D365 to service the publics access to the commission's services
Forms Engine: A forms engine to support dynamics form creation on the public facing portal
A self-service workforce management scheduling tool to allow
Future-Ready Enhancements: The platform supports predictive case resolution, sentiment analysis, and proactive customer engagement.
Impact:
The solution has delivered measurable improvements across key areas:
Case Handling Efficiency: Significant reduction in manual processing time
Agent Productivity: Significant improvement in first-contact resolution rates.
Workforce scheduling: Simplified self-service workforce scheduling significantly removing time-consulting manual scheduling
Workforce management: automated workforce overflow management to increasing workforce utilization and improve work throughput
Digital Engagement: End-to-end digital engagement for the public, aligning with the commission’s start-online, stay-online strategy.
Future:
The Fair Work Commission’s transformation journey is continuing. The customer-facing portal designed to provide a seamless, self-service experience for applicants and legal representatives is scheduled to go live shortly. Once launched, it will complete the Commission’s vision of enabling users to start and stay online throughout their engagement.
Future enhancements will focus on expanding AI capabilities, integrating additional service channels, and refining analytics to further improve service delivery and user experience.