Better than bottled: focus on quality

With a 31% market share and 5.4 million customers in the Netherlands, Vitens is the country’s largest supplier of drinking water. The organisation extracts, purifies, and delivers drinking water to public taps, private households, and businesses in six provinces.

Household contracts are registered when someone moves into a new home. Vitens also supplies water used in the production process to manufacturing organisations in the provinces in which it operates. Both private and business clients contact Vitens’ customer service department to open and close accounts when moving home or premises, to query their bills, and to report any incidents relating to the quality or supply of water.

A publicly owned company, Vitens is committed to providing its customers with the best quality water, at the lowest cost. Vitens aims for a customer satisfaction score of 8/10 – an important indication that the organisation is fulfilling its promise and is on track to achieving its strategic goals.

Household contracts are registered when someone moves into a new home. Vitens also supplies water used in the production process to manufacturing organisations in the provinces in which it operates. Both private and business clients contact Vitens’ customer service department to open and close accounts when moving home or premises, to query their bills, and to report any incidents relating to the quality or supply of water.

A publicly owned company, Vitens is committed to providing its customers with the best quality water, at the lowest cost. Vitens aims for a customer satisfaction score of 8/10 an important indication that the organisation is fulfilling its promise and is on track to achieving its strategic goals.

Vitens 2.0 programme to improve customer satisfaction

To help achieve this score, the organisation launched a project called Vitens 2.0 which focused on ways of improving customer service. ‘At the time, it was difficult to resolve a query in one call,’ explains Geuje van Dijk, Transition Manager – Customer and Billing at Vitens. ‘We had a customer- facing contact centre to take calls relating to accounts, billing, and fault reporting.’ Vitens also ran a separate, internal contact centre for its maintenance engineers.

'Our front-office and back-office operations were segmented and largely activity-based,’ says van Dijk, ‘so a customer query, even a process as simple as registering a new account, could sometimes involve many departments ... and result in a backlog of work.'

Vitens wanted more customers to make use of its Internet self-service facility for simple requests and queries, for example to log a fault, or activate an account when moving house. ‘We also wanted to increase our “first-time fix” rate for customer queries,’ says van Dijk.

Closing the gap between front-and back-office

To close the gap between its front-office operations which included the contact centre – and back-office functions, Vitens decided to move to a process-based, matrixed operating model. The front and back office were therefore merged into a single, customer services department. The department would manage three processes: transfers (opening and closing water accounts when customers moved home/premises); customer relations; and billing and collections. Employees were trained to perform a number of activities in each process.

A business process management system and workforce management tool supported this new structure, allowing for better planning, monitoring, and management of resources and workflow.

Existing technology doesn’t support new operating model

Vitens needed to integrate its customer contact centre system, which at the time ran on a dedicated platform, with this new, process-based model and workforce management system. ‘We needed to determine the best solution for our requirements, at the right cost,’ says van Dijk. ‘Our existing system was nearing end-of-life and was complex and costly to maintain. It would also be expensive to upgrade, especially considering that we weren’t making use of all the functionality it offered.’ says van Dijk. ‘We wanted a solution that would match costs with benefits.’

Single platform integrated with workforce management system

Dimension Data proposed upgrading the telephony system and integrating it with the contact centre system used for maintenance contractors. This consolidated platform would link the contact centre system with the workforce management system, giving Vitens the functionality it required, at a lower cost: the organisation would not have to pay for upgrading to a system that had excess functionality, and it would need fewer resources to support the single platform.

Dimension Data advised Vitens to select the Avaya Aura® Contact Center. The integration with Avaya Aura® Workforce Optimization to support Vitens’s back-office processes was key to the success of this project.