Background
This major state-based water and wastewater service provider delivers services to over 1.5 million households. In 2019, it developed a Customer Strategy built around the core principle of “customer centricity” – understanding the lived experience of customers and designing solutions that enhance it.
As part of this strategy, the organisation set out to make account management “surprisingly easy.” The goal was to simplify every interaction, reduce frustration and offer seamless, flexible options for managing accounts. By enabling transactions through preferred channels – including online, email and SMS – the organisation prioritised customer convenience and satisfaction at every touchpoint.
Discovery & solution design
Fujifilm partnered with the service provider to support their digital transformation journey. Their goal was to become a customer-centric, forward-thinking business and optimise the customer experience by:
- Providing multi-channel communications according to customer preferences
- Improving the onboarding and billing experiences and providing new communication channels
- Enhancing the accuracy of customer contact details and delivery preferences
- Boosting the digital conversion rate (previously at 19%) through ‘surprisingly easy’ digital experiences
The first step was to undertake an in-depth analysis of all customer lifecycle interactions, including onboarding, billing and account management and to design solutions to enhance customer experience and account management. This analysis included investigating contact centre call volumes and causation, assessing optimal payment channels, examining bill informational content and metrics and understanding customer demographic communication preferences.
Implementation highlights
Fujifilm customer communications specialists worked collaboratively with the organisation to understand different customer journeys, interactions and transactions to identify opportunities for improvement and propose solutions together with a transition plan based upon defined priorities and benefits. The result was 23 proposed innovations grouped into five separately deployable initiatives:
- An online customer contact details validation process delivered by email and SMS to proactively gather customer information and communication preferences and to ensure that existing customer contact details are current and accurate. Up-to-date details were an essential prerequisite to deploying electronic communication channels and promoting customer adoption of digital communications
- Enhancements to communications, including welcome packs and bills, to improve customer engagement, simplify actionable transactions and facilitate understanding of the information provided
- Utilisation of SMS to improve customer experience by providing bill delivery to customers whose communication preference is mobile through SMS and providing proactive reminders of payments due and direct debits
- Provision of secure access to the full bill from email summary bills and from email and SMS reminders, ensuring customers have easy access to all required information
- Integration of the Fujifilm hosted content management system with the organisation’s Salesforce CRM to enable Contact Centre staff to email and reprint bills and notices directly from Salesforce to facilitate first call resolution of customer requests
These innovations were presented to the executive team with detailed costs, benefits and delivery timeframes. Fujifilm developed a transition plan aligned to business goals and priorities, ensuring delivery of value in the shortest possible timeframe, with minimal impact to core systems and IT resource capacity.
Fujifilm User Experience (UX) specialists developed prototypes for the digital interactions, working collaboratively with stakeholders, enabling them to visualise the customer experience and refine requirements. The prototyping process ensured that the solution optimised the customer experience and accelerated delivery times.
Fujifilm and the organisation worked together to deliver the innovations according to the agreed schedule and to realise benefits in the shortest possible timeframe.
Results & outcomes
After the initial solution deployment, we worked together to analyse the results of the innovations and implement incremental enhancements and new initiatives based upon quantifiable benefits.
The outcomes and benefits of the digital transformation program include:
- Significant increases in customer adoption of digital channels
- Nearly three quarters of digital customers updating their contact details and channel preferences
- A significant reduction in paper, print and postage costs
- A reduction in contact centre onboarding and billing related call volumes
- Delivery of a flexible interactive multi-channel communications platform that the organisation can quickly and cost-effectively expand to support future business initiatives
