Thames Water digitises operations

Call for change

Thames Water takes care of water for 15 million people across London and the Thames Valley region. They transport and process over seven billion litres of water and wastewater every day—a huge undertaking.

It schedules 700,000 repair and maintenance jobs a year. As with any operation of this scale and level of complexity, things can go wrong. Sewers get blocked or pipes freeze and burst. When problems like these occur, customers turn to Thames Water for help and responding quickly to these requests is critical.

Unfortunately, the Thames Water team was reliant on a fragmented legacy IT estate which did not provide a complete view of the available information to contact centre and field teams, hampering effective customer service delivery.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Implementing Salesforce service cloud

Accenture partnered with Thames Water to rapidly design and implement a data-driven Salesforce Service Cloud and Field Service solution. With it, Thames Water could consolidate 13 existing systems across the customer services, work scheduling and dispatch, and field engineer teams into one single end-to-end solution.

In just over six months, Accenture and Thames Water delivered and deployed the first minimum viable product (MVP) release of the solution. The fully integrated solution has the customer at its core—it provides customer service agents and field crews with a consistent view of the information they require to carry out their roles effectively while also keeping customers informed on progress.

It also takes previously manual processes and automates them to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the field engineer work schedule and provides clear visibility of all work in the system to enable data-driven decision making.

A valuable difference

In the operational contact centre, customer service representatives now have quick and easy access to the details of current and previous customer interactions, which helps them provide continuity of care and inspires trust on every call.

The solution also provides real-time visibility of progress, which helps representatives provide proactive updates to their customers. The result? Compliance rates for key customer touch points jumped from 63% to over 96%.

As a result of the workforce management programme, Thames Water is getting the right engineer, with the right tools, to the right job, at the right time. The utility is managing its workforce as efficiently as possible, improving the employee experience while keeping the customer at the heart of its operations with complaints down by over 70%.