City of North Bay Digital Modernization and Customer Service Strategy

Perry Group Consulting developed a five year Digital Modernization and Customer Service Strategy for the City of North Bay, Ontario. The strategy gives the City an incremental roadmap to make services easier for residents to reach, expand online services, and modernize its technology and business systems. North Bay Council endorsed the strategy in August 2026 as the framework to guide future budget decisions.

What North Bay needed

Like many Ontario municipalities, North Bay was balancing three pressures at once: residents expecting more services online, growing demands on staff, and aging technology systems. Residents often had to work out which department to contact, and much of the City's technology work had been driven by immediate needs. The City wanted a clear, realistic plan that would move it from reacting to problems to making steady, strategic progress.

How we approached it

Our team worked closely with City leadership and staff over ten months. We assessed the City's current technology environment, customer service model and business systems, and presented the findings in a clear diagnostic that showed Council where things stood and where to focus first.

From there, we built a roadmap sized to the City's capacity. The strategy favours steady, phased progress, with each step solving a specific need and setting up the next. It also builds in governance from the start: every project returns to Council with a clear explanation of its costs, benefits and risks before funding is requested.

What the strategy delivers

Service North Bay is a new customer service hub that gives residents one phone number, one email address and one website for reaching the City. The goal is to resolve 80 per cent of inquiries at first contact.

Online services will grow alongside phone and in person service, so residents choose the channel that works for them. As Ben Perry explained to Council, the strategy adds digital options to the ways residents already reach the City, and a real person stays available whenever they want one.

For business systems, the roadmap takes a phased approach. The City is moving its financial system to a cloud hosted environment with primary and backup servers in Canada, then focusing on a human resources information system. First phase work, funded with $500,000 in 2026 and $500,000 in 2027, includes website improvements, cybersecurity upgrades, financial system improvements and planning for a system to track and manage resident requests.

Why people and process come first

A strategy is only as good as its delivery, and our work puts change management at the centre. "Buying technology is the easy part," Ben Perry said in his presentation to Council. "It's the people and process change and the change management associated with it."

That thinking shaped the roadmap. It helps the City resource modernization projects with the same seriousness it brings to infrastructure, and gives Council a practical way to set priorities as each project comes forward.

Why municipalities choose Perry Group

Municipalities are our sole focus. Most of our 35+ consultants are former municipal IT and business leaders, so our strategies reflect how councils, budgets and municipal teams work in practice. We're vendor neutral, and our deliverables are practical, right sized and built for municipalities to keep running with long after we leave.

North Bay builds on our customer service strategy work with York Region, Orillia, Scugog, Cambridge and Guelph, and our digital strategy work with Abbotsford, Burlington, Oakville, Vaughan and York Region.

Services featured in this project

• Customer service strategy, including service model design and a single point of contact for residents

• Digital strategy with a roadmap for expanding online services across every channel

• IT and business systems strategy, from current state diagnostic to a phased plan for core systems

• Governance and change management that keep Council informed and staff supported through delivery

If your municipality is planning its own customer service or digital roadmap, talk to our team.

This article was prepared with the assistance of AI.