Company
Yorkshire Water supplies 1.7 million
UK households with water and sewerage
services. The company manages the
collection, treatment and distribution of
water, supplying around 1.24 billion litres
of drinking water each day.
Their vision is to be "clearly the best
water company in the UK." With Ofwat
positioning them at the top of the annual
league table for operational and customer
service excellence, things are obviously
going in the right direction.
Challenge
Yorkshire Water receives 400,000
incoming customer calls a year purely
about water supply problems, such as low
pressure, burst pipes and water quality.
The increase in water meter usage means
even more customer enquiries.
Although 80% of customer calls are
relatively common and simple to respond
to, the other 20% are complex. Not only
are these complex queries hard to answer,
providing an incorrect response can lead to
a significant increase in costs, unnecessary
engineer call outs and customer
dissatisfaction. Yorkshire Water needed
a knowledge management and customer
service solution advanced enough to
enable its agents to easily handle complex
enquiries. It wanted to make every agent
as good as its best agent by propagating
expertise, best practices and resolution
knowledge to the entire pool of agents.
An intuitive, dialogue-based user interface
would make the knowledge easy to use.
At the operational level, the company
wanted to improve first-call resolution,
reduce call handling and wrap-up times
and minimize repeat calls and escalations.
Solution
In order to deliver an informed and
personalised customer service experience,
Yorkshire Water appointed eGain
to provide knowledge management
technology and best practices in customer
service processes. eGain’s knowledge
management solution is trusted by
numerous enterprises around the world to
improve contact centre performance, boost
service quality and enhance customer
experience. In addition, Yorkshire Water
chose eGain due to its experience in the
utilities sector and the ability to easily
integrate eGain software with existing
customer relationship management
(CRM) systems to provide personalised
service, leveraging data residing in such
systems.
Implementation
Partnering with eGain, Yorkshire Water
implemented eGain Knowledge+AI™,
eGain’s award-winning AI-powered
knowledge management solution for
contact centre agents. eGain’s professional
services team helped them design best
practice processes for knowledge capture,
creation and management as well as
customer service delivery.
The knowledge base now contains over
750 resolutions and is being used by 130
agents. The system drives efficient and
effective conversations between agents and
customers, improving service consistency,
first-call resolution and compliance with
corporate processes, while minimising the
number of unnecessary engineer callouts.
Yorkshire Water trusts eGain
eGain Knowledge+AI increases first call resolution,
measurably improves customer satisfaction and reduces
unnecessary field visits thus saving millions of pounds
CASE STUDY
Key results for eGain
Knowledge+AI
Cut unnecessary engineer call outs,
reducing an average of £30 per
call, thus saving the company £3.6
million per year.
Achieved greater than 30% first
call resolution on operational
contacts, with further improvement
anticipated.
Agent training time reduced by 25%.
Agents are able to handle a wider
range of enquiries.
Marked improvement in employee
satisfaction.
Reduction in call handling and wrap-
up times.
Agents are handling an increased
volume of calls.
Enhanced customer experience and
satisfaction.
“One of our requirements was to free our
agents from rigid and often inappropriate
scripts. eGain’s solution drives adaptive
and flexible conversations between
agents and customers that speed up call
resolution and enable superior customer
experience,” commented Alan Clubb,
team manager on the Integrated Customer
and Operations Management (ICOM)
team, Yorkshire Water.
Following a call, the audit trail of what
has been discussed and recommended
is automatically captured by the eGain
system and passed into Yorkshire Water’s
call tracking system, along with the service
request. The process eliminates the need
for the agent to make notes. This speeds
call wrap-up time while ensuring high-
quality data for closed-loop management
of the call centre. If a callout is required,
the transcript of the call diagnosis is passed
to an appropriate engineer. This ensures
that the right engineer is despatched with
comprehensive details about the nature
of the problem so that the visit results in
efficient problem resolution.
Results
A service excellence mindset is firmly
entrenched in Yorkshire Water’s business
and eGain's solution is playing a key role
in enabling it.
Yorkshire Water is now achieving
more than 30% first call resolution on
operational contacts which, in turn,
has cut unnecessary engineer call outs.
Reduction in field rolls saves an average
of £30 per call adding up to a whopping
£3.6 million per year.
With the continued improvements
planned in handling operational calls
using eGain Knowledge+AI, the first call
resolution rate is expected to rise further.
This will generate more savings, but
more importantly, improve the customer
experience.
In addition, eGain’s knowledge
management solution has reduced agent
training time by 25%. Agents are able
to handle a wider range of enquiries,
resulting in a marked improvement in
employee satisfaction. The reduction
in call handling and wrap-up times is
enabling agents to handle a larger number
of calls.
Customer satisfaction has also increased,
with Yorkshire Water currently hitting an
impressive 80% of its customer experience
measures.
Future
Yorkshire Water prides itself on providing
customers with the highest levels of
service. It is that philosophy which spurs
the company to constantly improve its
service efforts.
On the back of the project’s success,
Yorkshire Water is now planning an
expansion in the use of eGain’s knowledge
management solution to handle alternative
types of customer enquiries. In the
future, Yorkshire Water is looking to
expand its customer communication to
include online channels such as web self-
service and to create a unified customer
engagement hub. This will provide
customers with a convenient and effective
way to find answers to common queries
on a 24x 7 basis and communicate online
with Yorkshire Water. eGain’s omnichannel
customer engagement hub (eGain
CEH™) platform enables companies to
simply plug in new interaction channels
in a seamless manner to deliver a unified
multichannel customer experience.
Alan Clubb concludes, “It is our goal to
be the best water company in the UK and
to achieve this we need to differentiate
ourselves by being the leaders in customer
service. In keeping with this goal, we will
continue to work with eGain to provide
innovative customer service options and
further improve customer experience.”
It is our goal to be the
best water company
in the UK and to
achieve this we need to
differentiate ourselves
by being the leaders
in customer service.
In keeping with this
goal, we will continue
to work with eGain
to provide innovative
customer service options
and further improve
customer experience.
Alan Clubb
Team Manager
Integrated Customer and Operations
Management (ICOM)
Yorkshire Water
”
“
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.egain.com
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