Improve Customer Communications and Maintain Healthy Customer Relationships
Developer Services Team
The Developer Services Team now engages with their customers in an immediate and meaningful way via automated digital conversational messaging directly to the customer’s mobile phone in a familiar messaging channel resulting in improved response rates (2% to over 20%) and customer engagement rates (increased by 100%).
Following the success of digital messaging for the Developer Services Team, Affinity Water broadened its use of Webio’s customer engagement platform to optimise campaign scheduling and expand across the group to include Communications, Reactive Incident Teams, Customer Support and Debt Management.
Communications Team
The Communications team uses digital messaging to provide customers with advance warning of upcoming work in their area that could impact them, as well as associated information sessions, reducing in-bound phone contact. The platform also enables the team to develop targeted campaigns that seek to increase awareness of key services, such as the online account portal.
Reactive Incident Teams
High volume digital messaging provides critical support in managing and responding to water-related incidents, such as leaks or supply disruptions. The system can swiftly notify customers about incidents, provide regular updates, and offer guidance on steps to take, thus enhancing transparency and trust. This well-organised communication helps to minimise the impact of incidents on customers and results in quicker resolutions.
Customer Support Centre
The Customer Support Centre uses Webio in a similar way to the Reactive Incident Teams. Whilst their team uses this for unplanned incidents and supply interruptions in a reactive manner, Customer Support use Webio in a proactive manner, for high-volume messaging to advise of planned M&R works that may affect specific areas with traffic management or for just general awareness that Affininty are working in the local area.
Integrating Webio’s digital messaging platform within Customer Support has led to a significant uptick in customer service dynamics. This technology allows the team:
→ Contact customers with timely and accurate information regarding their water services.
→ Handle routine messaging, which then frees up human agents to focus on more complex issues, enhancing overall efficiency
→ Consistent and rapid communication increases customer satisfaction, leading to an improved customer service experience
Debt Management
Affinity Water uses Webio’s messaging solution to schedule and send SMS messages to its customers relating to their debt payments and debt management.
Webio Smart Scheduling
Smart Scheduling delivers an intelligent way to manage campaigns to use resources best, for instance, throttling campaigns and controlling the speed of message delivery to manage volumes according to agent capacity.
The Potential of AI and Automation is Endless
Conversational AI is adept at understanding and responding to customer queries and provides personalised interaction while offering 24/7 support and reduced wait times. Additionally, conversational AI assists in gathering real-time feedback and insights from customers, which is invaluable for refining strategies.
For debt management, the AI's data-driven approach also helps identify customers who might be at risk of falling into arrears or are in a vulnerable position, enabling proactive engagement. This improves debt recovery rates and enhances customer relations by providing support and solutions tailored to individual financial situations.
"Affinity Water are utilising Webio in many of our customer teams to keep our customers informed. We work in a reactive environment and having a user-friendly system to text customers when we have a service failure gives us the opportunity to inform customers in as little time as possible, whether it's 10 or 10,000, we can do this in minutes!”
Melissa Parker, Service Delivery Manager
