The Client
Translink is the public transport authority for Queensland, Australia, responsible for planning, coordinating, and delivering integrated transport services across the state. A division of the Queensland Government's Department of Transport and Main Roads, Translink serves millions of passengers and manages customer engagement across a large and geographically diverse network through its digital platform, translink.com.au.
The Situation
Translink needed to transform its digital engagement capabilities by consolidating fragmented marketing and customer data systems into a unified platform. Its core objectives were:
- Unifying customer data: Create a single source of truth for customer profiles by migrating data from multiple legacy systems into Acquia’s Customer Data Platform (CDP).
- Personalizing engagement: Deliver targeted, multi-channel campaigns using Acquia Campaign Studio’s segmentation and personalization tools.
- Gaining efficiency: Streamline segmentation, campaign execution, and reporting to reduce manual effort, accelerate marketing workflows, and enable teams to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives.
- Enhance compliance and privacy: Improve consent management and privacy compliance through centralized opt-in/opt-out processes.
- Improve the customer experience: Increase engagement rates and survey participation through timely, relevant communications.
The Challenge
Translink faced three significant and interconnected challenges in delivering this transformation.
The first was scope and delivery complexity. The initial full project scope required significant governance overhead, making it unviable to deliver in a time- and cost-efficient manner. The team needed to find an approach that could deliver high-impact features without sacrificing momentum or business value.
The second was data privacy and security compliance. As a Queensland Government agency, Translink needed to meet stringent security requirements, including ISO 27001 and SOC 2 standards, and obtain approvals to safely support offshore data processing before the solution could proceed.
The third was change management at scale. Successfully adopting new ways of working across multiple teams with distinct priorities and workflows required a coordinated approach to stakeholder engagement and training to bring marketing and digital staff along with the platform transition.
The Solution
Acquia led the implementation and delivery across four phases over nine months, beginning with extensive business planning, requirements workshops, and an audit of available data feeds and existing systems. This groundwork allowed Translink to define benefit profiles, KPIs, and key use cases focused on efficiency, compliance, and customer experience before any technical work began.
To address the complexity of the initial project scope, the team adopted an agile delivery framework, de-scoping and re-prioritizing work to focus on high-impact features while maintaining momentum and demonstrable business value throughout the engagement.
In the first phase, Acquia finalized the technical architecture, integrating Acquia CDP, Campaign Studio, and Personalization. In the second phase, the team provisioned production and UAT environments, integrated with Active Directory for secure authentication, and established daily sync pipelines for customer profiles from Translink's ticketing system, alongside migrating data from the legacy marketing platform into the CDP.
To meet Queensland Government security requirements, the team conducted comprehensive threat and risk assessments and obtained the necessary governance approvals — including approvals to safely support offshore data processing — ensuring the solution aligned with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 standards throughout delivery.
The third phase focused on training and adoption, with Acquia delivering in-person workshops, self-paced modules, and regular virtual sessions covering segmentation, campaign automation, and analytics. This structured, multi-format approach ensured that marketing and digital teams across the organization could confidently and consistently adopt new ways of working. The final phase rolled out the MVP, which included core capabilities such as data unification, campaign automation, and foundational personalization.
The Results
Within six months of go-live, the platform delivered measurable improvements across data quality, compliance, and operational efficiency.
Data quality and unification: Acquia CDP unified over 1.2 million customer profiles, enabling accurate targeting and reporting at scale. The Identity Resolution Engine automatically merges duplicate records and manages ongoing identity resolution, ensuring data integrity as the platform continues to grow.
Operational efficiency: Campaign creation time dropped significantly, with self-service segmentation and reporting tools eliminating manual bottlenecks and freeing Translink's marketing and digital teams to focus on higher-value work.
Compliance and privacy: Translink improved governance of opt-ins and opt-outs, achieved full compliance with Australian and Queensland privacy legislation, and aligned with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 standards, thereby reducing its overall privacy risk exposure.
Customer experience: Seamless customer data migration ensured continuity of service and experience throughout the transition, with no disruption to Translink's passenger-facing communications.
The Acquia DXP tools have proven intuitive and easy to administer for Translink's marketing and digital teams, supporting ongoing growth and continuous improvement through strong governance, reporting dashboards, and privacy controls designed to scale alongside the organization's evolving needs.