Scottish Water has saved more than £18m in the 12 months
since it rolled out a £7m online system from Oracle to improve
customer service.
The savings have come from an increase in productivity, with staff
now carrying out 11 jobs per day rather than five. This has led to
a reduction in headcount and overtime payments.
"We had no connectivity before, with jobs faxed or phoned in to
regional offices, creating inefficiency," said Cheryl Black,
customer service director at Scottish Water. "The new system
provides workflow management and an overview of events, so that,
for example, we do not have two vans doing jobs in the same
road."
Scottish Water spent £2m to buy the technology, £1.5m to implement
the system and £3.5m on business change management. This included
training, redesigning business processes, eliminating
inefficiencies, such as repeat calls, and doing work in a planned
rather than a reactive way.
"The ratio of spending shows that this project was as much about
rethinking our processes as technology," Black said. "We went with
Oracle because most other suppliers wanted to offer us the full CRM
package and said our budget was not big enough."
Other companies from the UK, Russia, China and the US are
considering using Scottish Water's project, known as Promise to
Resolution, as a model, according to Oracle and IT services partner
Celerant Consulting.
Oracle's E-Business Suite underpins the initiative, with the
supplier's Teleservice and Field Service applications used to
connect Scottish Water's call centre to more than 200 field staff
equipped with Panasonic Toughbook laptops.
The system allows customer advisers to tap into an online database
containing records of customers' previous calls, water service
problems in the area and the status of the current maintenance and
repair projects.
This means more calls can be dealt with immediately, cutting the
cost of dealing with repeat calls, said Black. The company is on
track to meet targets of 85% of calls to be resolved first time. It
is currently achieving 67%, compared to 53% before the programme
was developed, she said.