Water Company Implements a New Omnichannel Solution

Tony Dolan shares how Connect Managed helped new water company Wave introduce an omnichannel contact centre solution.

Wave, which is the company formed following a merger between Northumbrian Water and Anglian Water, wanted to introduce a new omnichannel solution to better manage demand and improve the customer experience.

Connect and Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) have enjoyed a three-year partnership to date, so Wave came to Connect Managed for help setting up a new Contact Centre and to extend their solution to support them manage these spikes in demand.

Here’s the Connect Managed account of how Wave got up and running with their new Contact Centre solution.

Acquiring and Supporting New Customers

As a new start-up business in the utilities industry, they needed a robust omnichannel solution to support its customers and deliver a consistent customer experience across multiple channels.

In addition to ensuring a strong customer experience, Wave required a solution that would help it to acquire new customers and ultimately retain them.

To overcome this challenge, they asked Connect to propose a high-end Contact Centre infrastructure that would provide an omnichannel experience, enabling it to engage with customers in multiple ways from one central platform.

A key aspect of this digital transformation was providing them with the tools to personalise customer interactions and facilitate self-service to ensure customer satisfaction.

Since they were effectively starting from scratch with no agents, precise call and email volumes were unknown.

In addition to this, the Wave team was unsure what the customer experience should look like in practice, so we worked with them to identify their requirements and define this.

“Our consultant-led approach is the reason Wave chose us to support them.” ~ Dave Lee, Business Solutions Consultant, Connect

Creating an Omnichannel Customer Experience

Connect has worked closely with Wave to provide a sophisticated omnichannel Contact Centre solution featuring voice (inbound and outbound), email, chat, and Twitter, as well as engaging customers through proactive contact (email and SMS campaigns). This has enabled it to personalise customer interactions and increase self-service uptake.

It was important for them to have an integrated omnichannel solution, while making customer and employee engagement the best it can be. The business also wanted to integrate the solution with its new billing system, which we helped them to achieve.

Throughout the project, Connect helped Wave to innovate by embedding its new agents into the project team to define technical and functional requirements tailored to their needs. We designed the solution around their new processes with the flexibility to change, reflecting the dynamic nature of a new business.

We were able to respond quickly to Wave’s time-sensitive request, bringing value as a partner through regular meetings and crucially delivering the solution before the new business launched, enabling it to start handling customer calls and interactions straight away.

Platform Consolidation Results In Enhanced CX

Connect helped Wave’s Contact Centre go live on its launch date as a new company with a brand new set of agents and a working solution able to take calls instantly, enabling them to hit the ground running and ensure a seamless customer experience.

Wave now operates out of two Contact Centres — one in Durham and one in Peterborough — and runs on a consolidated platform powered by Genesys, which has virtualised the agents across both locations. That way, any agent in either Contact Centre can handle contacts for both locations. This has resulted in better agent performance and an enhanced customer experience.

The solution enables Wave to deliver a strong customer experience in a way that keeps operational costs to a minimum, while allowing the business to grow and acquire new customers.

The work continues on an ongoing basis, evolving with it as its needs and challenges naturally change to ensure it can continue to engage its customers proactively.

Author: Rachael Trickey