Ensuring Uninterrupted Customer Service for UK Utilities

Overview

Wales & West Utilities look after the pipes that keep the gas flowing to heat homes, power businesses, and keep the lights on for over 7.5m people in communities across Wales and South West England. Delivering such a vital service, its imperative that the business provides 24-hour, 7 day a week, 365 days a year service.

Wales & West Utilities has a wide-ranging customer base which includes homeowners, businesses, developers, power generators, local authorities, social housing providers, charities, and consumer groups – all of whom have different needs.

Challenge

Wales & West Utilities was already working with Route 101, with their Customer Service team using the Serenova Classic platform. Whilst the existing platform supported inbound and outbound voice customer contact, email, text, and (to a small degree) web chat, the business needed to take the “next step” to meet evolving requirements and boost functionality and visibility of performance. As Wales & West Utilities’ incumbent contact centre supplier, Route 101 had a unique understanding of the existing technology environment and the business’ requirements, which meant we were able to identify areas for improved efficiency and advice technology solutions which would complement and integrate well with the surrounding platforms such as their SAP CRM.

Why Route 101 and Lifesize CxEngage?

Wales & West Utilities was looking for a unified contact centre solution that would provide uninterrupted operation and comprehensive reporting to make sure they could continue to deliver outstanding levels of customer service. The project went to tender, and the CxEngage by Serenova solution was evaluated alongside numerous competitor platforms. The ease of use from an agent perspective, comprehensive reporting capabilities and cost-effective nature of the CxEngage platform, coupled with Wales & West Utilities’ existing relationship with Route 101 and trust in us as a supplier who can provide consistent, effective support and advice, ultimately resulted in the selection of Route 101 and CxEngage.

Solution

Wales & West Utilities were seeking to deliver an efficient, omnichannel customer and colleague experience, with the ability to measure outcome based satisfaction per channel. Throughout the tender process, Route101 worked closely with the business –hosting workshop sessions exploring the ‘art-of-the-possible’, evaluating and presenting the impact and outcomes of a migration to CxEngage, and identifying and delivering additional training to ensure the Wales & West Utilities team could be confident in their capacity to deliver exceptional customer service.

With Route 101 and CxEngage, Wales & West Utilities benefit from:

A scalable, flexible platform with clear call quality and high availability.

The business needed a scalable, flexible platform that would enable them to respond rapidly to peaks in demand and offer clear call quality and high availability (>99.9%).

True omnichannel with web chat and automated response capability via AI/Chatbot.

CxEngage provided the integration into SAP CRM and the ability to deploy and use a Chatbot. This was a great fit alongside the existing technology set and presented a suitable “next step” in the Wales & West Utilities transformation journey.

Real-time performance management and seamless workforce management.

Wales & West Utilities needed an easily configurable solution that would provide real-time analytics and dashboard facilities. CxEngage delivers greater capability and flexibility in terms of configuration options and offers WFM solutions to help the business meet fluctuations in contact volumes. The platform delivers a much more user-friendly interface for administration and reporting tasks.

Fully compliant, secure payment and call recording capabilities.

By integrating CxEngage with Key IVR’s secure PCI-compliant payment platform, agents can take payment via secure callback at the click of a button. Wales & West Utilities are able to meet customer and regulatory obligations around GDPR, call recording, reporting and payments with ease.

Cost-effective integrations into other business systems via APIs.

The Wales & West Utilities’ contact centre platform needed to integrate with the organization’s other systems, including SAP, GIS, One network and Xoserve. With the open APIs in the CxEngage platform, this is not only cost-effective, but simple.

Flexible Home Working

With the contact centre deployed before the Covid19 pandemic hit the UK, Wales & West Utilities benefitted immediately from the CxEngage platform’s effectiveness as a flexible home-working solution.

The Key IVR secure payment element of this project, enabling agents to launch secure callback at the touch of a button from within the CxEngage dashboard, was deployed seamlessly and without any disruption to services later in the year due to the impact of Covid19.

About Lifesize

Take command of your customer experience with Lifesize’s cloud contact centre platform: CxEngage. Supporting voice, email, chat, SMS, social – and integrating with the CRM for truly seamless experiences – it’s a highly scalable, true multi-tenant contact centre solution. Reduce training requirements and simplify stakeholder engagement with the intuitive interface and ensure rapid deployment with a future-ready model delivering automatic and continuous updates.

About Key IVR

Key IVR provides high-volume automated payment collections through their market-leading cloud software. They are the provider of choice for companies wanting to deliver high-quality payment collection systems to their clients and customers. Available in 14 languages across 11 currencies, their solutions are recommended by the Chartered Institute of Credit Management, worldwide payment gateways, and PCI-DSS QSAs.

About Route 101

Flexible, scalable contact centre, customer engagement, and unified communications software in the cloud.

Give your workforce the right tools to do the job and optimize the tools, processes, and technology behind the customer experience. Route 101 helps businesses choose and use the right technology to make sure their customer experience is the best it can be. Combining industry-leading communications and contact centre solutions, we provide the tools to help you deliver excellent customer experience goals and empower your workers. We do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to: evaluate your current setup, identify key areas for improvement, and recommend the right route to take.

We help organizations choose and use the technology that makes them easy to work with, and great to work for. Make it easy for customers to talk to you, and help your employees stay engaged, valued, and connected.