Case study: Sydney Water simplifies its fragmented customer experience

Sydney Water found customers were receiving a fragmented experience when attempting to get in touch with the utility company.

Kathy Hourigan, general manager customer services at Sydney Water told Digital Nation how the company simplified its customer service through a new digital platform.

“Our customers were telling us that it was a fragmented experience,” Hourigan said.

“We used to often say we've got lots of self-serve out there and that made us feel good, but from a customer point of view, it wasn't a great experience.”

As an example, Hourigan said customers could head to the company’s website and fill in a "smart" form. 

“[However] there wasn't a lot smart about it because there was a lot of humans in the background, completing those forms and they had to go to different parts of the website to do different things," she said. 

Hourigan added some cases resulted in customers needed to call the contact centre to do other things. 

Sydney Water has been in a partnership with SAP, for the past five years, resulting in the utility company switching up its customer experience processes.

This enabled the company to automate its high volume, low complexity work.

“That frees up our highly trained contact centre people to do some of the more value add type of customer work," Hourigan explained. 

“The very noticeable change has been we've been successful in automating a lot of the high-volume work and SAP continue to work with us to tweak how we can continue to do that.”

Hourigan said the upgrade has also seen and an uplift in engagement scores.

“They're using a modern system. It makes it so much easier for them, they have one log in, they log in in the morning and everything they need is sitting in that one application," she said. 

“For our people, they don't care if there's multiple systems it's attached to or sitting behind. They want an easy process for them to work at their workstation every day, the billing system and the CRM moves data across those two systems, our people love it."

She said it has made the staff at Sydney Water's job "a lot easier". 

“Our contact centre engagement scores are high," she said. 

“Then from a customer point of view, we've certainly been able to improve the look and the feel of our communications and our interactions with customers too."

Hourigan added Sydney Water has also been able to introduce a lot of new branding and launch that through the platform. 

To Hourigan’s surprise, Sydney Water's customers started using the new platform quickly.

“Often when you do these technology implementations, it's quite some time before you see some of the benefits,'" she said.

"The thing that surprised us was how quickly the adoption was for our customers because we decided that we wouldn't do a lot of promotion."

She added the plan was to “let the platform stabilise” and ensure “our people were comfortable before we did any promotion”.

“Without that promotion, we're so excited about the adoption rates. The take up has been absolutely amazing," she said. 

“It took us three or four years for customers to register for an outage notification and we ended up with about 46,000 in three years.”

Sydney Water has seen over 200,000 customers register since March to receive outage notifications, which Hourigan said is roughly an “400 percent increase".

“That is amazing, a lot less things are being referred to the back office, which is great [and] allows our people to do more of that meaningful work.”

Hourigan ended, "There’s another 10,000 customers per month that have signed up since March for electronic billing versus paper bill, which is also something that we're excited about.”