System Overhaul Delivers Greater Customer Experience for Regional Water Authority
- Industry Energy & Utilities
- Capability Strategy & Advisory
- Customer Water Utilities Authority
Our client is an Australian Water Authority that provides water (urban and rural) and trade waste services to over 150,000 residents in Victoria, as well as the management, maintenance and operation of reservoirs and water storage basins.
Opportunity
Traditionally, utility companies focused all efforts and investments on delivering reliable, high-quality resources, whether that was electricity, gas, or water. However, as the industry embarks on a digital transformation, the focus is on creating an engaging customer experience, and forward thinking and innovative utility organisations are making major investments to meet the needs of customers beyond supply.
Due to these shifting expectations, our client was looking to enhance its customer experience through innovative modern technology solutions that would help it streamline services and customer interactions.
Key focus areas had already been identified by the organisation, with the need to replace existing legacy billing and CRM solutions due to a variety of factors including limited features which had restricted the ability to develop a holistic view of its customers. Aswell as an inability to create a single integrated process across core CRM, billing and asset management systems.
This led to:
- Distributed business processes.
- Extensive manual activities.
- Slow issue resolution times.
- Duplicated and unmanaged repositories between core systems that needed to be collated and maintained.
- Inability for customers to manage their own accounts and payments.
- Lack of flexibility to support future business objectives.
- Procurement and support limitations from third party vendors driving up costs.
- Operational risk of legacy billing solution becoming unsupportable resulting in increased maintenance costs.
Solution
With a vision to achieve successful transformation of its core business systems, our client took the opportunity to first review the current technology landscape and evolving consumer needs and identify the best-fit solution.
Following a proven approach to digital strategy and insights gathering, our Team at NRI led a series of business stakeholder workshops to help identify, define and prioritise key business requirements. These insights informed the development of a technology roadmap which focused on delivering value across Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and billing and asset management capabilities.
As part of our Advisory service, we facilitated a market scan of over 20 vendors, resulting in the recommendation and selection of a new and innovative cloud solution for our clients billing platform.
Following this, we then led the development of the overall integration and information architectures to facilitate the end-to-end solution architecture for the technology road map and the Core Systems replacement program.
This paved the way for creating an enterprise solution that leveraged and integrated the best of breed Salesforce CRM solution, with our Team responsible for the development of the high-level enterprise solution delivery plan to support our client’s overall procurement and business case.
Outcomes
A key attribute of the new solution is the integration of core CRM, billing and asset management systems which has resulted in the following benefits:
- Improved business efficiencies due to a reduction in manual processes.
- Improved accuracy of data by reducing human error from manual data entry.
- Integration with other key IT systems.
- Automated customer information flow between systems.
- Greater customer self-service use and reduced reliance on the Customer Contact Centre for simple transactions.
- Greater accessibility of account information for customers and ‘in-field’ staff via mobile devices.
- Applications are professionally supported and regularly updated.
- Greater adoption of light weight scalable Software as a Service (SaaS) solution for core business functions.
- Easy to carry out system development and configuration to support the client’s strategic direction (e.g., Information Management Strategy, Enterprise Mobility Strategy, IT Security Strategy).
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