Client story Water Corporation: A new, streamlined self-service experience for 1.3 million customers
By Insight Editor / 25 Oct 2020 / Topics: Customer experience
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Utitilies
Challenge:
The client’s online customer experience was delivered via three portals with limited self-service functions and had a myriad of issues that meant their call centre endured a steady stream of enquiries regarding water use visibility and comparisons.
Solution:
- A modern, consolidated solution that could support self-service, promote more sustainable water usage, reduce enquiries to its call-centre, and ultimately, deliver a far more engaging and effective digital experience.
- The solution was built on Sitecore 9.2 hosted on Microsoft Azure for the latest personalisation capabilities, marketing automation and intelligent forms.
Results:
- 29% increase in self-service transactions
- 93% of surveyed customers said they could successfully complete transactions online
- 90% of applications for financial relief services (promoted by Covid-19) were submitted online rather than via the contact centre
- 28% increase in traffic to the site (compared with the same time last year)
- 24% more users logged in, indicating greater customer engagement
Solution area:
Insight’s Digital Innovation solutions help clients digitally transform their operations to improve user engagement and experience.
Water Corporation partnered with Insight to reinvent its digital experience, and deliver a new, customer-focused website that delivered the water usage insights, billing information, and self-service facilities its customers needed.
The problem: a disparate, complex and confusing online experience
Residents and businesses in Western Australia rely on Water Corporation to provide them with safe, reliable water – as well as information on their account, the facilities to pay online, and advice on how to lower their water consumption.
In the past, however, this information was provided via three different online portals – Water Corporation’s public website, a My Water website, and a water use comparison tool called Water Watchers.
The My Water website did offer some self-service functions, but it also battled with a myriad of issues. It wasn’t accessible via mobile devices, the registration was complex, the navigation was confusing, and specific content was difficult to find. As a result, Water Corporation’s contact centre endured a steady stream of enquiries regarding water use visibility and comparisons.
The public website, through which Water Corporation served a range of user needs, was also complex and monolithic. It had been custom built, which meant content updates were costly, and over the years, it had become disjointed and overwhelming for users.
Water Corporation wanted a more modern, consolidated solution that could support self-service, promote more sustainable water usage, reduce enquiries to its call-centre, and ultimately, deliver a far more engaging and effective digital experience.
The solution: a seamless, user-focused solution which moved Water Corporation into the future
Insight and Water Corporation worked closely to identify the key challenges of its current website infrastructure, and design a new, future-ready digital platform. The aim was to bring the existing portals together to deliver a smooth, sophisticated online experience that would enable intuitive self-service, anticipate user needs, proactively inform customers, and help drive more sustainable water use.
From a technical point of view, the new website needed to integrate with multiple core legacy systems, and have a simple content structure and functionality, with layered authentication and targeted, data-driven actions that could provide insights into customer water use.
The key aims were:
- Improve customer satisfaction by addressing known customer needs and expectations.
- Drive operational effectiveness by shifting high-volume, repetitive transactions and queries (such as checking account balance, paying and understanding bills, checking and understanding water use, providing information on outages and watering days) away from the organisation’s call centre.
- Reduce business costs and processing times through end-to-end automation and an increase in the uptake of lower cost-to-bill channels (through paperless billing and direct debit).
- Implement a new, powerful content management system that would enable fast, cost-effective publishing of information.
Key technology aspects of the implementation included:
- Migrating from Sitecore 8.2 to Sitecore 9.2 - to take advantage of the latest personalisation capabilities, marketing automation and intelligent forms.
- Migration from on-premises physical servers to the cloud to Microsoft Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), for scalable demand.
- Integration with internal systems via the organisation’s Hybrid Integration Platform, built on webMethods Enterprise Service Bus.
- 2-way integrations to seven internal systems to ensure the supply of billing data, water usage, water outages, supply information and more.
- Federated authentication with Azure B2C and Azure Active Directory for Single sign-on.
“Requesting an account balance is an example of a high-volume transaction that has been significantly improved. Previously, this information was only available behind a complex login and often resulted in a number of calls to the call centre. Now, it’s a simple module on the home page. Customers simply enter their account number to reveal their balance. They also get information on their watering days, waterwise status and potential water outages. This function has been used around 33,000 times,”says, Ivana Marjanovic, Manager - Digital Experience & Product, Customer Strategy & Engagement, Water Corp.
Results:
Just one month after launch of Water Corporation’s new website, the benefits were clear:
- 29% increase in self-service transactions
- 93% of surveyed customers said they could successfully complete transactions online (without having to call)
- 90% of applications for financial relief services (promoted by Covid-19) were submitted online rather than via the contact centre
- 28% increase in traffic to the site (compared with the same time last year)
- People were spending 14% more time on the website and visiting 42% more pages per session, suggesting more valuable, easier to find content
- 24% more users logged in, indicating greater customer engagement
