Case Study: Anglian Water Improves Operational Efficiency

Anglian Water has improved its operational efficiency with the Aspect Proactive Engagement Suite (Aspect PES).

The challenges

With a large number of residents in Anglian Water’s catchment area being reliant on its services for the supply of clean water, the efficient notification of any outages or problems is a crucial element of the overall customer experience.

Running this process through its operational call centre, Anglian Water had a pre-recorded message in place on inbound calls to notify customers of such issues. However, this was reactive rather than proactive – requiring customers to actively contact Anglian Water in order to find the relevant information on a problem they had already experienced.

“We wanted to remove this element of customer effort, and drastically reduce the volume of inbound calls, particularly during peak hours,” said Graham Blackburn, Contact Centre Manager at Anglian Water. “The aim was to integrate a new system with our existing operations, which would allow us to proactively contact customers, and provide them with the information they needed before they realised that there was a supply issue. To achieve this, we had to understand who was being affected and then be able to provide tailored proactive notifications to this specific target audience, very quickly.”

The solution

The company came to the conclusion that the most effective way to achieve its desired result was to invest in tailored technology that could quickly notify a defined cross-section of customers.

Aspect Proactive Engagement Suite (Aspect PES) is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based, fully automated, suite of customisable outbound customer engagement applications. The suite is designed to provide personalised, legislation-compliant, and cost-effective interaction experiences, hosted in the cloud.

When a situation such as a burst water main occurs, a field technician assesses the situation and calls in the details to the operational contact centre for analysis, in order to determine which customers will be affected. This information can then be fed into the purpose-built Aspect PES program that automatically notifies the relevant customers in the defined affected catchment area.

This notification is delivered in the form of a pre-recorded message to customer landlines (or mobile if one is not provided), with insert sections for relevant towns, street names or areas.

As technicians manage to narrow the affected area, notifications can be localised in line with this, with secondary alerts sent to those customers for whom the problem is resolved. This personalisation feature was developed by Aspect and Anglian Water to specifically tailor the product to its business needs.

The results

The positive impact of Aspect PES has far exceeded the breadth of its proactive outreach, sending more than 200,000 proactive messages per year. By notifying customers the moment an issue has – or will – occur, it has removed the necessity for customers to call Anglian Water for initial information on the matter. The reduction of inbound calls has had a huge indirect benefit, in the form of large fiscal savings that Anglian Water estimates at £100,000 annually.

“We have been delighted with the results over the past two years. Aspect PES was incredibly easy to implement and integrate into our existing business processes,” said Graham Blackburn, Contact Centre Manager at Anglian Water. “It has allowed us to consolidate multiple channels of communication into one cost-effective, unified platform, with minimal involvement on our part.”