A burst pipe leads to wasted water and widespread disruption. But if the location of the incident is not recorded accurately, it can also lead to substantial delays - increasing costs and impacting customer relationships - all affecting the bottom line. Severn Trent Water has deployed GIS in its customer service centre to ensure that all incident reports are accompanied by precise location references. As a result, the company can now locate and respond to faults more quickly, deliver an improved customer service and gather more accurate data for management reporting.
Severn Trent Water is one of the UK's largest utility companies, supplying nearly two billion litres of drinking water a day to eight million people. The company operates in an area of more than 21,000 square kilometres and derives its name from the two significant river basins that make up the region.
The Challenge
Every year, Severn Trent Water receives over 140,000 calls to its service centre from people reporting issues such as burst pipe and interrupted water supplies. The company has a duty to respond quickly to these incidents - but it wasn't always easy to establish precisely where they had occurred. Previously, customer agents in the service centre only had access to rudimentary address data on the computer system. If a caller was unable to provide an accurate address, it was very difficult to pinpoint the precise location of the incident. Customer agents often spent a lot of time looking at A-Z map books, road atlases and even directories like the yellow pages, trying to work out locations from vague verbal descriptions.
As many as 95% of incidents reported did not have precise grid reference location and, inevitably, some jobs would be directed to entirely the wrong part of the company's area. At a more local level a misspelled road name or a wrong suburb name could result in inspectors being sent to entirely the wrong part of a city.
"Sending an engineering repair team to a wrong location is a very expensive mistake to make", explains Dave Pearson, lead GIS architect at Severn Trent Water. "Valuable time is lost and a lot of additional effort is wasted trying to find out the correct location."
Severn Trent Water decided to address this problem by the introduction of a comprehensive and very flexible gazetteer service, backed up with digital maps made available to its customer agents. "We needed a way to ensure the accuracy of the location information collected in the call centre", says Pearson. "By greatly reducing the probability of sending out inspectors and teams to the wrong location, we felt that we had an opportunity to improve efficiency and reduce costs."
Solution and Capability Delivered
Severn Trent Water had been using GIS solutions from ESRI (UK) for a number of years to help it manage its underground assets. When it launched the project to deploy GIS in its customer service centre, it evaluated the latest solutions available from ESRI (UK).
"Because the solution was going to be used while callers were on the phone, it had to be extremely fast", says Doug Cubin, GIS consultant to Severn Trent Water. "We felt that ESRI's GIS technology would give us the fastest possible retrieval of addresses and maps. Indeed, it has lived up to our expectations and, in some areas, surpassed them."
Severn Trent Water selected ESRI (UK)'s Intranet mapping solution to make GIS capabilities available to all customer agents in the service centre. In addition, it developed a gazetteer application based on ESRI's spatial database engine to provide customer agents with a comprehensive searching capability. Through the use of this solution, customer agents can search for maps by address, motorway junction, schools and even the location of chemists and pubs. "If a caller reports a problem on the bend in the road, and can roughly describe the area and a landmark or two, we can find it!" say Severn Trent Water.
Within the service centre, the customer agents use a customer relationship management (CRM) application and follow an on-screen workflow. If a caller is not reporting an issue at his or her own home (when a precise address and postcode can be obtained), the GIS automatically opens. Customer agents then follow customer descriptions and drill down into the maps to find the right location. When they click on the map, a precise X-Y coordinate is automatically attached to the incident report, along with the postcode of the nearest address.
Severn Trent Water had the necessary skills to develop its gazetteer application in-house. However, it also took advantage of ESRI (UK)'s implementation expertise, taking advice and support from its solutions architects and support services at different stages in the project.
The Benefits
GIS has quite literally transformed the way that customer agents work and has led to dramatic improvements in efficiency. In situations such as flooded rural roads,inspectors and engineers have a far better chance of finding incidents quickly. There is less wasted time, which contributes to reduced costs and a better service for customers.
* There are approximately 140,000 calls that result in a field job, many more are dealt with at the point of contact and go no further.
* The time taken to record a customers (incident) location has more than halved, reducing the time taken over the average transaction in the call centre.
* 95% or more contacts that do result in a field visit now start life with an accurate grid reference before they leave the service centre.
* Addresses are spelt in a consistent manner and the job management system is automatically populated with accurate address information and grid reference.
As a result, there has been a significant fall in the number of incorrect locations reported by the field teams. Every year in June, Severn Trent Water plots the location of incidents on a map to help it analyse any patterns and clusters. This process is extremely important for OFWAT reporting and for making infrastructure investment decisions. In the past, a complex process involving much manual intervention was used to map historical incidents, and it took many months to clean up the data and gain location coordinates to accompany each incident report. Now, with the use of GIS, all incidents have precise X-Y coordinates which lend themselves to automatic processing, saving many weeks of manual data cleansing time that can be applied to other quality improvements. "To make this year's reporting a less onerous task it really was crucial for us to get an accurate spatial reference for each incident report - and that's precisely what we have achieved", says a Severn Trent Water consultant.
The huge success of the GIS is evidenced by the strong reaction from users. The system's intuitive interface and seamless integration with existing workflows meant that customer agents and managers quickly got used to the new on-screen mapping capability and now, don't like to be without it. "Almost immediately, GIS became indispensable in the service centre", explain Severn Trent Water. "As a result, it has become a 'priority one' business system. If a hardware failure causes a system outage, it has to be fixed straight away."
The Future
At present, Severn Trent Water's GIS is used by 250 customer agents at one site near Coventry, with up to 40 concurrent users. However, in the near future, the company plans to increase the number of users quite significantly. It has launched a new initiative to make an adapted version of its GIS available to all employees, so that everyone can search and access accurate digital maps of the region over the company Intranet. "Scalability is a key advantage of the GIS solutions", say Severn Trent Water. "We plan to expand our GIS horizontally and balance an increasingly large load across multiple servers. As a result, we will be able to make this GIS available to potentially several thousand employees located across multiple sites, and will look to ESRI (UK) for help to realise this vision."
ESRI (UK) is part of the global ESRI network. With the single, largest pool of GIS expertise in the UK, the company is the technical authority on GIS. ESRI (UK) provides solutions, technology and services including off the shelf applications built on the ArcGIS software suite and an extensive range of consulting and training services. As the UK market leader for Utilities, ESRI (UK)'s customers include National Grid, Severn Trent Water, ScottishPower and Northern Gas Networks. Through a unique combination of world-class technology, domain expertise and implementation experience, ESRI (UK) is able to deliver the deeper levels of network understanding demanded by the industry. This process of enhancing sustainable business growth by developing GIS solutions with the power to anticipate and meet industry specific requirements is known as Visionary Thinking.
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