Water companies can transform their customer experience by breaking siloed thinking

The water industry is struggling, but there are solutions that are within the sector's grasp, if leaders are willing to be bold.

While it may be outages, sewage spills and poor customer comms that make headlines, a customer’s experience is the sum of every decision their water provider makes: every piece of technology, every internal process, and every operational choice ultimately influences whether you can provide the service people need. That comes down to how teams within your organisation work together, and the systems they use to do so.

The role of those internal processes on the customer experience is laid bare in a recent EFRA Select Committee Report. Inconsistent and overly-optimistic communications during supply interruptions at South East Water were highlighted as particular source of frustration, but the problems run deep in how the company operates:

'The company has also failed to sufficiently plan for critical periods and outages, leading to poor escalation processes, insufficient alternative water supplies, inconsistent communications and a failure to support all vulnerable customers'.

There’s a direct connection between poor internal ways of working, and a devastating impact on customers, especially those who are most vulnerable. When fewer than 1 in 10 affected customers were satisfied with how South East Water handled the incidents, it's clear that something isn’t working.

The challenges are not unique to one company, or even the water sector. The risks of relying on legacy technology and infrastructure, exacerbated by a lack of curiosity and accountability from leadership, all while an organisation operates in functional silos without access to shared data, will be familiar patterns for many.

So to begin with, how do we break out of those silos? And how do we break these patterns?

Siloed working and the link to customer value

Most processes in large utility organisations weren't designed; they evolved. They grew out of immediate needs, departmental mandates, and the technological constraints of decades past. This organic growth has created a tangled web of duplication. Different teams - from customer service to engineering - are often involved in responding to supply issues in silos, creating complex, variable processes that are costly to maintain and train against.

Consumer Council for Water (CCW) data shows an increasing trend for customers contacting water companies, with 35% of customers contacting their supplier in the last year. Given the investment pressures in the sector, these operational costs cannot be ignored.

For your field engineers or customer service agents, this manifests as wasted effort, caused by systems and processes that weren’t designed to work together. For the customer, the result is a service that can fail them when they’re at their most vulnerable.

Consider an anxious utilities customer calling about a billing anomaly. Even if your agent has the right conversation, if it needs to be recorded on three different clunky systems with databases that don’t speak to each other; that internal struggle is directly transferred to the customer when next month another unaffordable bill lands because of a ‘system error’. For people who rely on you for water, electricity or heating, the effects of errors can be life-changing. The reputational damage for providers is similarly impactful, as we’ve already seen.

The power of mapping your services

In crisis situations, it's all too easy to blame particular teams or functions. But as long as  a utility company still operates as a disconnected set of silos, rather than as an organisation that works together to provide critical services for customers, these problems will compound over time.

A service mapping approach can help to address that challenge by surfacing how your internal processes impact on customer-facing ones.

Service maps are often used to map and improve the customer journey, but doing the same for your internal services not only helps to resolve organisational inefficiencies and improve the experience of staff, but also offer an untapped opportunity to deliver customer value.

Stepping back and starting to map your services, and the role of internal processes, can help start to break down these internal walls as you show how all teams impact on the overall service, and start to build a mandate for change.

Bringing together cross-functional groups of people from across the organisation, including customer service staff, field engineers, and procurement can demonstrate the power of mapping your services, showing that connection between your internal processes and the service you provide.

On its own, a service map won't fix customer satisfaction rates, or prevent another water crisis. But reframing your company as a set of services, enabled by internal teams and processes, can start to break down the functional silos and redesign processes to enable your teams to deliver on the service your customers need. The first step is mapping one of those services.

If you'd like to learn more or speak to our team, get in touch: contact@public.digital