Lisa Kelly, Computing, Tuesday 4 November 2008 at 10:52:00

Converged communications offered the business-enhancing potential to make the merger of two water utilities viable and beneficial

Mergers are always a time of huge upheaval, but as utility firms South East Water (SEW) and Mid Kent Water proved, moments of turmoil can provide the impetus to commit to sweeping changes in methods.

When the companies merged last year, they saw an opportunity to drive efficiencies and improve customer services through a converged communications strategy. These twin improvements are critical to the success of the new company – ­ the merger was approved by the regulators on the condition that SEW, now the UK’s second largest water-only company, let efficiency gains trickle down to its 2.1 million customers in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire.

By consolidating all voice and data traffic onto the next-generation digital network provided by ntl:Telewest Business and by moving to a new IP infrastructure which uses Cisco technology for its call centre platform, savings are racking up. Simultaneously, call-centre agents and field staff have greater access to critical information.

Mary Sabalis, head of business systems for SEW, says that aside from satisfying Ofwat, the water services regulatory authority, its strategy will safeguard business in the future.

“We have removed the technical barriers to providing excellent customer service. We are also starting to see the beginnings of competition, with talks about other companies being able to sell water on our behalf,” she says.

“If we provide poor service, customers are more likely to sign up to someone else, which encourages us to achieve the maximum potential of the new system to improve customer service.”

The Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IPVPN) ­ – which covers eight principal sites and 55 water stations – ­ provides a secure, flexible and managed infrastructure for carrying voice, video and data traffic, providing higher bandwidth for information sharing between employees.

Sabalis, who came from Mid Kent Water, says that planning has been crucial to success. “Before I left, all the building blocks were in place for voice over IP (VoIP) and wireless, with a pilot in one site and all telemetry sites on the IPVPN. There was a big planning exercise, where the network needed to take us in the future and all the groundwork was laid for IP telephony as both legacy systems for voice needed to be replaced,” she says.

The pilot for IP telephony was carried out in the Snodland and Haywards Heath sites, before being rolled out across the group.

Sabalis says there will be significant savings on inter-company phone calls as previously calls between Snodland and Haywards Heath – ­ the headquarters of the water companies established pre-merger – ­ relied on external numbers.

She says further savings will be made when videoconferencing takes off in the next couple of months between the three major sites at Snodland, Haywards Heath and Frimley.

“We have departments located at separate sites. It was good to meet people face to face when we merged, but now we have got to know each other properly, videoconferencing will help cut down on travel. Voice conferencing is great, but if a meeting necessitates showing documents then videoconferencing is the answer,” says Sabalis.

For videoconferencing to work, Sabalis says that preparation is vital. “You have to site it properly by ensuring good acoustics and lighting, which should take about 10 days per site,” she says. One of the biggest effects of the new network is on call centre operations. During the merger process, a decision was taken to insource the call centre to comply with SEW’s identity as a community-based company.

“We had insourced the contact centre at Mid Kent Water to provide a better service, as water companies rely on having local knowledge. South East Water had an outsourced contact centre in Bristol, but we expanded the team on the Mid Kent side and are fully insourced,” says Sabalis.

Having an IP contact centre means that extra agents can be added to meet spikes in demand. “As a water company, you are doing a good job if a customer never calls you with a problem, but obviously we do get calls about billing and leaks and Ofwat regulates the call abandonment rate. “The IP contact centre means that we can staff up seamlessly,” says Sabalis.

Another key benefit is that new locations can swiftly be added to the network and staff moved around between sites without the need for re-patching or re-wiring. Crucially, IP telephony has given agents a number of tools to improve customer service, including being able to see how many calls have been taken and are waiting, the average length of calls and call logging.

“Agents can also escalate calls up to team leaders when necessary, whereas previously they would have to try and track down a team leader and put the caller on hold,” says Sabalis. The converged network is also improving its team leaders’ decision-making capabilities through improving their ability to track caller queues and forecast demand, using Cisco’s Workforce Management software.

“The technology enables us to be more reactive with information which means that customers are not kept in queues for long and employees who might be involved in dealing with the post or email can quickly be diverted to deal with calls if the pressure is on,” says Sabalis.

Cisco’s Internet Script Editor tool permits agents to monitor where customers are calling from and what options they are choosing, enabling SEW to control how callers are processed before reaching the contact centre, saving time and increasing productivity.

For example, call volumes increase when there is a problem such as a burst mains pipe, but by adding a call option for information on when the leak is expected to be fixed, callers concerned about the burst can hang up when they have heard the message, leaving agents free to deal with more in-depth calls.

“We can design call flows and dynamically inject options at peak periods, such as choosing automated methods, thereby offering customers more choice and speeding up call processing,” says Sabalis.

IP telephony is also now being used by the IT helpdesk with the result that a previous backlog has been cleared due to the improved efficiencies of the syste m. Enhanced information sharing with customers and employees is a big bonus of SEW’s unified communications strategy.

“The network has allowed us to get data into the hands of customer service agents which improves how they do their job,” says Sabalis.

Employees in the field can securely access and share files across the company network from all IPVPN-enabled sites. “We have more than 100 people in the field with rugged wireless laptops and they can more easily share information with customer service agents,” says Sabalis. “Now we have a robust network in place, massive amounts of data can pass back and forth very quickly.”

So far, 91 sites have wireless hotspots where field operatives can use laptops to connect to the IPVPN, with plans to expand to 180 sites. “We are a rurally based company and if we cannot get a GPS or GPRS signal our hands are tied. The wireless hotspots mean people in the field can park up where there is a signal available,” says Sabalis.

Opening up communication and collaboration for the benefit of customers in this way would not be possible without SEW’s new network. “We have a resilient network which has given us the agility we need to provide excellent customer service and cut costs,” says Sabalis.

Next week: In part three, Computing explores the key technologies that underpin corporate efforts to build a converged communications network.

Full published article at: http://feeds.computing.co.uk/c/554/f/10979/s/24c77c5/l/0L0Scomputing0O0Ccomputing0Cfeatures0C22296880Ccome0Etogether0E4318268/story01.htm

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