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Yorkshire Water Reinforces Award Winning Customer Experience by Upgrading to Amdocs CES TM
Amdocs has partnered with Yorkshire Water through a remarkable business transformation which saw the water utility go from being one of the worst performing in the UK, to one of the best, earning a host of awards and accolades for its dramatic improvement in customer service. Amdocs is part of Yorkshire Water's success in continuing to be one of the UK's leading water utilities for most of the last 10 years. Amdocs CES has become a mission-critical business system for Yorkshire Water and is part of the company's strategy to ensure business systems adapt to changing regulation. By upgrading and expanding its use of Amdocs CES, Yorkshire Water is positioned to achieve its service-oriented architecture and five-year systems development strategy. These will help the company constantly improve and innovate to benefit customers, reduce costs and deliver better value, and adapt to new and changing regulations. Yorkshire Water's customer service transformation has delivered improvements such as 98% of call-out appointments being met within a two-hour window; a 60% fall in the number of written complaints; and a 12m ($17.5M USD) a year saving from field manpower and process efficiencies, and right-first-time performance.
| Yorkshire Water |
| Headquarters: |
Bradford,
Yorkshire, UK |
| Website: |
www.yorkshirewater.com |
| Employees: |
2,200 |
| Revenue: |
876m (2007/08) |
| Customers: |
2m private households, 130,000 businesses (4.8 million users) |
| Market position: |
Ninth largest water utility in the world |
 Read Case Study | Yorkshire Water, the ninth largest water utility in the world, has achieved a remarkable business transformation driven by its commitment to providing an Intentional Customer Experience TM. Supported by Amdocs, Yorkshire Water continues to deliver dramatic improvements in customer service and dominates the number one spot for customer service and satisfaction, including winning 'Utility of the Year' for an unprecedented three years in a row, along with a host of other industry awards. Not content to rest there, Yorkshire Water has continued to improve operational efficiency and customer service. For example, Amdocs CES forms a key part of Yorkshire Water's five-year IT and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy to ensure business systems can adapt to regulatory change. This strategy is motivating Yorkshire Water to constantly improve and innovate to benefit customers, to reduce costs and deliver better value, and adapt to new and ever changing regulations imposed by the UK's water industry regulator, Ofwat (Office of Water Services).
Like other utilities around the world, Yorkshire Water constantly faces new and refined regulations. Amdocs CES is helping the utility respond to these changes quickly and efficiently by enabling new types of performance measurement. For example, Yorkshire Water is working with Ofwat on a new performance improvement indicator where customer contact is classified to provide greater granularity in order to further improve customer service. A customer calling about a change of address, for instance, is deemed to make a wanted' contact because the customer wanted to make that call, whereas a fault is clearly not something the customer wanted to have to deal with, so reporting a fault is classified as unwanted' contact.
"Amdocs CES is one of Yorkshire Water's mission-critical applications..."
Beth Dodd, ICOM Customers IT Manager, Yorkshire Water
Amdocs CES is mission-critical
Beth Dodd, ICOM Customers IT Manager at Yorkshire Water, says, "Amdocs CES is one of Yorkshire Water's mission-critical applications and is fundamental to the utility's remarkable record for customer service improvements. To ensure that we continue to benefit from Amdocs support and innovation, Yorkshire Water has upgraded to Amdocs CES."
By upgrading, Yorkshire Water will continue to benefit from secure, responsive and reliable product maintenance and support services. Using certified methodologies and with support options ranging from online services (such as case login and tracking and an online knowledgebase) to one-on-one interactions with account managers and support experts, Amdocs Product Support helps Yorkshire Water ensure consistent performance and business support for Amdocs CES. A self-service support portal allows Yorkshire Water to create and update its own cases and track their resolution.
Stephen Kelk, Senior IT Professional at Yorkshire Water adds, "Amdocs plays a fundamental role in helping Yorkshire Water deliver customer service excellence. Upgrading to Amdocs CES ensures a continued high level of support and access to Amdocs' in-depth knowledge and expertise. Yorkshire Water has some ambitious plans for developing and innovating its IT environment like implementing new IT environments and increasing business systems integration to increase efficiencyand having the latest version of Amdocs CES is central to that strategy."
"Amdocs plays a fundamental role in helping Yorkshire Water deliver customer service excellence."
Stephen Kelk, Senior IT Professional, Yorkshire Water
Amdocs/IBM Partnership Unifies Customer and Data Management
With 4.8 million customers, Yorkshire Water generates huge data volumes: around 45 million records. Much of this data is at least a year old and, although infrequently used, agents must be able to access it quickly when required. To maintain best performance and simplify and shorten the upgrade to Amdocs CES, Yorkshire Water leveraged a powerful partnership between Amdocs and IBM. This partnership delivers a highly unified customer management and data management solution to help Yorkshire Water enhance the customer experience while significantly reducing total cost of ownership.
Working in parallel with Amdocs CES, the IBM Optim Data Growth Archiving solution has enabled Yorkshire Water to reduce costs and optimize the performance of the Amdocs Customer Management offering. Optim selectively restores archived data very quickly to the production database, on demand. This shields customers and agents from applications slowing down and system downtime, and enables fast, accurate and efficient interactions. Agents retain seamless access to the archived data through the Amdocs Customer Management user interface.
Initially, Optim archived 50,000 cases a night and removed two years of data from the primary database in a little over a month and continues to maintain peak performance by archiving around 18,000 cases per week. Optim also supports tiered storage strategies, providing the capability to remove archived data from more expensive server-based storage to a separate lower-cost storage medium, further saving Yorkshire Water in storage costs.
"The combination of Amdocs CRM and an effective database archiving strategy keeps our business agile and flexible, allowing us to respond to customer service and other needs across the enterprise," says Beth Dodd, ICOM Customers IT Manager at Yorkshire Water. |
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