Customer services

Description

Notification of Award of the following: Thames Water is the UK's largest water and wastewater company providing services to 15 million customers across London and the Thames Valley. Each year we currently issue in excess of 7 000 000 items of correspondence, including bills and receive in excess of 4 000 000 contacts from our customers via phone, letter, e-mail and the web. These include technical supply-related queries, customer and account queries (e.g. billing, change of address) and contact relating to payment and debt. In the household market within the Thames Water region, we bill and serve 13 500 000 customers for both water and waste services, and provide waste services only to a further 1 700 000 customers who receive their bills via 1 of 4 regionally based water only companies. In the Non-Household (business customers) sector, we bill and serve 265 000 customers for both water and waste services, and provide waste services only to a further 35 000 customers who receive their bills via 1 of 4 water only companies. Our vision: Our Retail Household Business Plan, which can be found here, was submitted to Ofwat as part of the 2014 Price Control, and provides a 5 year view on how we propose to significantly improve services for our customers. We are passionate about becoming a truly customer centric organisation. As such, we are looking for a BPO partner (s) who shares our vision for customer excellence, and can work with us to integrate and enhance capability across the partnership in order to place Thames Water in the upper quartile of the industry's Customer Satisfaction table. Our BPO partner (s) will work with us to transform the business using innovation to help us deliver our overall retail strategy: 1. Remove drivers of dissatisfaction by creating a more resilient service platform; 2. Improve the customer experience through proactive customer management; 3. Build brand perceptions to help improve Thames Water's position in the markets it operates, and in the hearts and minds of our people; 4. Deepen the customer relationships to meet customer segment needs; 5. Develop and extend our retail model to be ready for market deregulation. Improvements in Customer Satisfaction will be delivered, for example, by reducing repeat contacts for our customers by ensuring ‘Right First Time’ and reducing hand-offs. Our partners will support us to improve our customer policies and processes, to ensure they are fit for purpose in an ever-changing and expectation driven world. The scope of work: We currently have a number of customer service contracts in place, both onshore and offshore, that are delivered to our residential and business customers by our existing partners on a day-to-day basis. Our chosen partner (s) will be accountable for delivering these services seamlessly across a front, mid and back office environment with the level of care that customers would expect from their water and waste provider. They will be enabled to resolve customer queries directly through multiple channels and help to minimise the number of complaints we receive. Throughout the life of the partnership Thames Water will remain accountable for strategy, policy and key customer ‘Touch Points’. The scope of services currently provided by our BPO partners includes, but is not limited to, the list below. We will take the opportunity to ensure that the contracts with our new BPO partners align to our strategic objectives, and may use responses from the 1st round of the procurement process to help refine this scope. At this stage the services included (but are not limited to): — Inbound and outbound phone calls; — Customer Account Management (including taking customer payments, maintaining customer account details and receiving meter reads from customers); — New Connections and Disconnections (including setting up new properties, locating missing properties and managing change of properties); — Home Move (managing the process of customers moving in, within and out of the Thames region); — Credit and Collections (proactive customer contact for our customers who won't pay, can't pay or are struggling to pay); — Dealing with customer exceptions (such as meter reads, billing and home-move); — Enabling Channel integration, including Web-chat and Social Media services; — Managing customer correspondence such as letters, e-mails, text and standard set forms, together with back-office support services; — Enabling services such as reporting, analytics and MI, as well as agent performance management and resource forecasting. The way that customers interact with us through their channel of choice is important to us. We are therefore looking for a BPO partners (s) who will embrace our visions and values ethos: ‘Here for You: Innovating for Life in a Changing Environment’ which encompasses the key behaviours as detailed in the attached document. We expect our partner to live and breathe these values in everything they do. Requirements of the bidder: The principle of ‘Right Shoring’ our services is key to optimum customer satisfaction and we want to ensure the best location is chosen for each service. 1 of our key principles for our voice calls is around tone/voice affinity, with preference towards English as 1st language.