THE City of Greater Bendigo will spend $150,000 preparing its Hopetoun Street offices to become customer service central.
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The works are expected to see the site - also known as Hopetoun Mill - through the years while the Bendigo GovHub is being built.
Corporate performance director Andrew Cooney said the renovations would create space for almost 20 more workers based at Lyttleton Terrace, who would join the team at Hopetoun Mill.
Among them were about 15 people who worked in the city's call centre, and three or four customer-facing staff.
Mr Cooney said accessibility would also be improved.
He said modernising the city's customer service approach would be a focus of the works.
"We are seeking to provide a similar experience that we now find when we do business with banks or government agencies such as Medicare, which focuses on providing streamlined customer service that aims to reduce wait times," Mr Cooney said.
"We are installing some self-help kiosks that will provide access to our website. Staff will be available to help customers navigate the site and manage their enquiry online, where possible, as well as providing the traditional over-the-counter service."
He said small cubicles and meeting rooms would be set up as a place for customer meetings.
Renovations at Hopetoun Mill start on Monday.
The customer service centre there will be closed for about a month, until December 6.
Mr Cooney said customers with any planning, building, safe and healthy environments or engineering enquiries, for which they would usually visit 15 Hopetoun Street, could attend the Lyttleton Terrace Customer Service Centre during that time.
The Hopetoun Mill office is scheduled to re-open to customers on December 9.
The customer service centre at Lyttleton Terrace will then close for good.
Construction of the $90m GovHub - and the demolition of the Lyttleton Terrace offices - is expected to start mid-2020.
The 1000-desk building is supposed to be built by late 2022.
About 200 workers will remain in the city's main Lyttleton Terrace office and three other buildings on the site after the customer service centre transitions.
They will all need to be out by April 2020.
The city is arranging to lease the upper level of the Fountain Court complex, at the corner of Pall Mall and Mitchell Street, from Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.
Staff are scheduled to start moving into Fountain Court from mid-January.
Mr Cooney could not disclose the costs associated with the move to Fountain Court, but said expenditure would be in line with the city's budgeted expenditure.
The city disclosed in February that it had budgeted $9,840,000 for fitout costs and $6,145,000 for temporary office accommodation and decant.
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