Background
City West Water provides all water and sewerage services for over one million residents and 40,000 businesses in Melbourne’s CBD and inner and western suburbs. With so many customers and its Customer First strategy, expectation and demand is high for the customer service team.
More Customer Time, Less Manual Process Time
As in many customer-focused businesses, staff wanted to spend more time engaging with customers and less time executing manual repetitive processes. Additionally, they wanted to provide their customers with the digital experience they have come to expect.
Payment Extension Requests – A Repetitive Process
One of the most common enquiries was from customers seeking asking for more time to pay their bill. For each request, the customer service agent would review the customer’s profile and payment history and follow a standard set of rules to determine whether to grant an extension. There were often dozens of these requests per day. These requests consumed a great deal of time, and this was time staff wanted to spend with other customers on more complex customer issues.
For customers, this was an awkward conversation to have with someone. Also, they could only submit a request during normal business hours when the call centre was open.
The Solution – Better Customer Experience. No More Manual Processing.
We automated the payment extension process for City West Water by developing a custom web application where customers could request and receive extensions online without any human processing.
When a customer requests an extension online, the application queries the customer database for their profile and history and calculates, based on roughly ten factors whether the customer qualifies for an extension. If the customer qualifies, their payment due date is automatically updated in the billing system and the customer receives an immediate response — all with zero intervention or manual processing from the customer service team. For the few customers who do not qualify, they are “soft handled” and asked to call for further assistance.
Results
Though the solution included integration across multiple systems (web, middleware, billing, customer database), City West Water was impressed by the speed of delivery. The implementation included training for call centre staff to ensure they were comfortable with the transition. It also included thorough security testing to ensure protection for both City West Water and its customers.
Both customers and staff benefited from the solution:
- Customer Service staff were very grateful to be freed up from a very routine but time-consuming process. They were very happy to be able to spend more time on the more complex customer cases
- Customers we able to conveniently request payment extensions at any time of day without having to phone in and speak with staff. They simply went online, filled out a short form, and received an immediate response. Their account is updated automatically.
