Case study: Yorkshire Water

In the mid 1990s, Yorkshire Water was in the doldrums as a local utility supplier, unable to compete effectively in a changing market and foundering with a poor customer image.

The year after a badly-managed drought in 1995, the firm hit rock bottom with a national newspaper rating it the 'UK's most hated company' and the Office of Water Services (OFWAT) moving it to the bottom of its customer service league table.

'It became a strategic imperative for us to change the business. The feeling internally was that we were at the edge of a precipice and something had to be done,' said Yorkshire Water programme manager Duncan Bennett.

'The first thing we did was set out a vision for the business, to become the best water company in the UK, which was going to be no mean feat. From this, we figured out exactly what would have to be done to achieve this goal.'

The company conducted extensive market research under a 'Voice of the Customer' campaign, which mapped out what its users were looking for and what levels of service would have to be achieved.

'This helped us to shape a set of strategic objectives, which included the acknowledgement that new IT systems would be needed to achieve out goals.'

'We established that we needed a single view of all customer contact with our business, as well as a single view of all planned and ongoing work on our water infrastructure that could have an impact on customer service,' said Bennett.

To do this, the company created a fully integrated, customer-centric IT infrastructure for managing work.

It based its IT infrastructure on three core programmes, which were tightly integrated - Amdocs Clarify for CRM, SAP R/3 for enterprise resource management, and Advantex-Utility for mobile workforce management.

'Now, if a customer calls us with, say, a pressure complaint, our agents can do an onscreen enquiry into the work management system to see if there's anything happening in the relevant neighbourhood that could be causing the problem.'

The results of the company's work have been significant.

This June, the company won Gartner's CRM excellence award, while OFWAT moved it up to second place on its customer satisfaction table (see box).

CRM improvementsThe results of Yorkshire Water's integrated, customer-centric IT systems have been dramatic. Although the entire programme cost the firm more than £40m, the utility is now saving £8.5m annually in its water and waste business units. Some of the successes it has measured are:

* Repeat calls from customers are down 10 per cent* Written complaints are down 40 per cent* Unnecessary field jobs are down 50 per cent* 70 of customer calls are closed on first contact* 99 per cent of appointments are dealt with in a customer-defined two-hour window* 99 per cent of customer call-backs are done inside 30 minutes

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