Case Study: Anglian Water
Business Challenge
In an industry where customers have no choice of supply and utilities do not have the ability to disconnect services, water companies face unique challenges in the consumer marketplace. With levels of debt expected to rise as the economic crisis worsened, Anglian Water recognised that it needed to make its collections process more effective and efficient. The company had been managing debt collection through its billing system, but with a desire to make its collections system more effective and efficient, the company recognised that a dedicated collections system could bring significant benefits to the operation.
The Decision Analytics answer
Following a market review, Anglian Water chose Experian’s Tallyman collections management system. The system has enabled the company to take a pro-active approach to collections, with a far more targeted approach to every customer in order to maximise recovery and minimise write-off, as well as providing the excellent customer service it is committed to.
The system enables Anglian Water to gain insight into delinquent customers through risk scoring and then segment them into distinct groups. Tallyman has reduced the cost to collect by automating many of the standard collections processes. By acting quickly on delinquency and ensuring the strategy delivery is seamless across the organisation, the customer starts to interact with Anglian Water early in the delinquency cycle. This increases the likelihood of restoring the customer’s account to good order and enables the organisation to support customers who are experiencing difficulties.
Anglian Water opted for an agile implementation of Tallyman to enable them to gain early benefits. Deployed in less than 6 months, business users were then able to extend the system and apply changes to the live system quickly and easily, in order to provide the optimum debt management solution for Anglian Water.
The Benefits
- Cost to collect reduced with the most effective actions prioritised and automated activities
- Reduced average debt by the recovery of more balance from each customer
- Reduced bad debt and losses and increased working capital with higher recoveries
- Recovery rates increased with an increased focus on the actions that will produce results
- Number of cases handled increased with the same resourcing levels
- Improved staff productivity with collectors highly focused on the most effective activities
- Continually monitoring and improving the performance of the arrears book and collections processes
“Experian has made us more agile, flexible and effective in our debt recovery strategy. We can now understand our customers in arrears including identifying customers who might be in difficulties and ensure that our contact with them is both personalised and appropriate. Experian provided excellent support in implementing and configuring the system for our needs, and has helped us to be more targeted in managing, collecting and reducing customer debt.”
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