Southern Water

As one of the largest water and wastewater companies in the South East of England, Southern Water were looking to appoint a single supplier who could provide a complete end-to-end managed customer contact service encompassing a number of different business areas.

Existing inbound and outbound mail services were provided by a combination of in-house resource and a number of external third parties. The management of which was disparate and un-coordinated, increasing the resource required to manage multiple services and suppliers.

Capita Intelligent Communications (CIC) were able to help the organisation be responsive to enquiries by quickly and efficiently processing post from their customers and increase consistency and control over customer correspondence sent out by their employees. 

The solution

Southern Water’s customer contact centre was already managed by Capita, but they knew they needed to improve on their innovation and efficiency within the business.

Partnering with CIC allowed them to consolidate third party contracts into a single supplier, to deliver multichannel communications.

Customer correspondence is handled on behalf of Southern Water as part of a digital mailroom service.

Physical mail items are received daily, converted into digital files and routed directly into the client’s workflow before 8am. Hard and soft copies of documents are archived, to be easily accessed for audit and customer service purposes. Retention and secure destruction is carefully managed.

Addressee data from undeliverable mail (gone away/returned mail) is captured and transferred to Southern Water, enabling them to update their database in-line with data protection.

Payments are processed securely and cheques are verified before being sent to corresponding banks and files are transferred to the Southern Water’s system.

To ensure outgoing ad-hoc communications are customer-centric, fast and trackable with consistent branding, a hybrid mail solution was introduced.

Staff can now print individual letters from a predetermined set of templates, customisable with specific customer information. These are automatically uploaded to an approval portal which ensures the users print request has been authorised by their manager. Once approved the documents are then securely auto-transferred to CIC where they are consolidated into optimised batches for print production and postal discounts.

Working closely with Southern Water, we also helped to plan better ways of producing and despatching bills, statements and correspondence packs for their customers.

By re-designing their existing bill, we not only simplified the layout to make it easier to understand, but also reduced the number of pages from fifteen to three.