Severn Trent.

The business need.

Severn Trent supplies water to over 4.3 million homes and businesses – so it’s no surprise that it has a busy customer contact centre. Its 400+ frontline service staff take thousands of calls a day. As a fully regulated business, it has to deliver a high standard of service performance, responding to queries promptly 24×7.

COVID-19 lockdowns threatened that performance. Like all organisations, Severn Trent had to find ways to maintain service in the face of reduced staffing levels in the contact centre. The company also wanted agents to be able to work from home. Its on-premise contact centre, installed over a decade ago, couldn’t provide the flexibility it needed.

Severn Trent approached Connect to enquire about a cloud contact centre. It had a provider in mind, having used the technology internally for its IT helpdesk. However, that solution is based on a usage model, meaning costs can be unpredictable. 

Connect’s experts quickly identified that, given the contact volumes Severn Trent typically manages and the extensive functionality of its existing operation, the proposed option would not offer the best value. Instead, the Connect team recommended that Severn Trent would be better served by a Genesys Cloud contact centre. This would give the remote working capability that Severn Trent urgently needed, and more closely replicate the existing contact centre and user interface. 

The solution.

With the decision made, Connect was able to provide a proof of concept Genesys Cloud solution to Severn Trent within a matter of days. The Connect team then worked closely with Severn Trent’s in-house technical team to ensure full integration with other key tools, so that the new contact centre could go live with all the functionality that agents and managers were accustomed to.

All 400 advisors are now using the cloud solution – whether physically in the contact centre facility at Severn Trent’s offices, or working from home. Connect provides managed service support, plus in the short term several professional services specialists, who are working as part of Severn Trent’s Agile team.

Outcome.

The essential requirement for Severn Trent was a contact centre solution that allows home working. The Genesys Cloud solution implemented by Connect has more than fulfilled that need. It offers a modern, feature-rich contact centre that replicates all the capabilities that advisors have always relied on, wherever they are working. That meant the company was able to maintain its high level of customer service, a crucial factor in Severn Trent being granted an “outperformer” payment of £25 million following regulator Ofwat’s 2021 assessment.