The Future of the Water Industry – Leading Resolutions

Regulation and business change means continued challenging times ahead for the water industry. As an objective guiding voice to ensure our customers always thrive, no matter what the circumstances, we believe there are five key areas of focus to enable you to address the challenges ahead:

1

External Challenges

2

Technological Innovation

3

Customer Service

4

Water Supply and Waste Disposal Operation and Culture Change

5

Culture Change

Industry Trends

The water and sewerage industry currently faces a number of external and strategic challenges. Business and domestic market deregulation will lead to increased competition and market disruption from lower cost-base new market entrants. In addition, the “water usage imperative” will have a direct impact on profitability as water companies will need to “cannibalise” their own income as part of encouraging customers to use less water. A trend we are seeing to meet these challenges is SaaS billing. The energy market deregulation experience has shown SaaS is the biggest differentiator in not just cost base but customer service. Transitioning from legacy billing systems to Software as a Service “utility billing in a box” solution will not only drive significant cost reductions (e.g. call centre FTEs and IT legacy support costs) but will also enable greater flexibility and agility at times of customer moves/billing/regulation changes.

In addition, Business Intelligence solutions provide visibility to accurate, reliable data and inform management decision-making. Our experience means we can realise your plans for a number of initiatives including:

Application Strategy
Migration from Legacy IT Billing to SaaS
IT Architecture Redesign
Business Intelligence Dashboard Design and Delivery
IT Team Capability Assessment

Technological Innovation

We are seeing innovations in 2021 that will fundamentally change how the water industry operates. Some of these have been around for a while but are just starting to come into the mainstream.

Increased use of sensors and IOT technology – constantly monitoring supply and treatment
The use of AI and Machine Learning to sort, analyse and review data received from sensors and IOT
Automation technology to drive repeatable actions based on the results from machine learning
Use of 5G and mesh technology to collect data easily, quickly and cheaply

Our expertise in IT innovation and automation will enable us to assess your readiness to embrace new ideas and modernise your current ways of working.

Customer service

The Ofwat league table shows that there is considerable room to improve customer service standards across the industry, particularly in the following areas:

Complaint handling
Billing accuracy
Unwanted billing queries
Compensation claims
Customer perception around time lag between action to – fix and perception shift
Cybersecurity/GDPR requirements
Delivering good, cost-effective service to vulnerable customers

We work with organisations to review customer journeys, policies and processes and look for ways to strengthen service, data management and communications. Our aim is to improve your customer’s experience using our wide range of expertise. This includes:

Call centre optimisation and automation
Field service operations including efficient and accurate meter reading
Service calls and incident response
Process pain point evaluation and plans to fix
Business process review and simplification

Data quality and processing solutions
Positive brand communication to be woven into all customer touch points
Cyber maturity assessment
Root cause analysis to identify failure points

Water supply and waste disposal operations

We understand that the reliability of supply and safe waste disposal are vital components of your business. Often there is worth in optimising infrastructure assets and maintenance operations ensuring they are operating at maximum potential. Focusing on asset management in terms of upgrade, maintenance, minimising downtime and refreshing has provided our clients with some quick wins. We provide knowledge of emerging technologies to help you run your operations as safely, efficiently and as cost effectively as possible. Example technology solutions can include cloud migration, IoT deployment, virtual reality development, data storage and retrieval and business intelligence dashboard delivery.

Culture change

We listen to our client’s core values and strategic goals. This insight together with our expertise in internal cultural transformation from assessment through to staff engagement, ensures the intelligence you receive from our customer service maturity assessment is an accurate view of your strengths and pain points ensuring you have a culture of ‘zero harm’.

About Us

We understand your complex and regulated market. With 20 years of IP and development within our service portfolio, we provide solutions that enable CIOs to fast-track key initiatives with certainty of outcome, typically shortening delivery timescales by 33%. We have a proved track record of high quality delivery on over 1,000 client projects resulting in 95% of CIOs re-engaging with us when they move to new organisations.

We help organisations succeed in today’s dynamic and digital age. When the rules of business are regularly rewritten and disrupted, our intervention has seen us deliver and transform organisations across multiple industry sectors. We support our clients to deliver their business strategy, underpin cultural change effort and support greater workforce collaboration and mobile working across their organisation.