United Utilities Case Study
Incident Management
The challenge
No matter what forecasters would like us to believe, British weather is pretty unpredictable. Sudden severe weather can bring abrupt changes to the electricity service provided by utility companies. The key is to reassure customers by keeping them up to date during a rapidly changing situation.
The solution
A mobile phone becomes a lifeline when other communication channels are affected by adverse weather which is why Rapide has become a key tool for United Utilities' communications.
For example, during the January storms, customers were kept informed of what we were doing to restore supplies, and when their power was likely to be restored. In the past, customers had to call repeatedly for updates to keep informed. So this is a great step forward in customer service and efficiency.
Ian Henshall from United Utilities takes up the story -
"When an area supply was restored, we also had to rely on customers to call us if their supply was still off, however this was dependant on the customer calling us for an update, and us then identifying that the area was back on and that this was a separate fault.
"This year using Rapide, we were much more proactive. We used text messaging to tell customers the area supply was back on, and if their property was still off, to call us on a free phone number as it was a separate fault.
"Overall, we sent out over 2300 texts over the 3 day period. We found that less customers called back for an update as they are happy with the text updates, only 1 customer asked to be removed from the text updates list, and it led to a positive reduction in call volumes to our Faults Call Centre.
"It has proved so successful, that we intend to extend text messaging to our 2.9 million water customers in the near future."
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