Yorkshire Water

RegionUnited Kingdom

Customer
Success Story

Yorkshire Water Transforms
Customer Experience with Verint
Quality Management
OpportunitySolutions

Verint® Quality Management™

Industry
Utilities

Results• Drives an engaging andrewarding customer
experience thatincorporates the voiceof the customer.
• Automates quality
assurance while surfacing
the most importantinteractions.
• Enables agile and effective
coaching to help people
develop their skills.
• Improved Institute ofCustomer Service Indexscore by 5.1 points.
• Decreased volume of
repeat calls from over 15
percent to 12 percent.
• Reduced number ofstage 1 billing complaints
by one third.

Yorkshire Water is a water supply and treatment utility company servicing
Yorkshire and part of Lincolnshire and Derbyshire in England. The parentcompany, Kelda Group, created Loop as a subsidiary to manage customer
service for Yorkshire Water.
Customer billing is one of the two key services provided by Loop, alongsidecontact center customer service. The 300-strong billing team supports
everyday voice and email inquiries – ranging from change of address to advice
on how to reduce water consumption. An additional 150 people provide backoffice support services, such as complex metering claims and complaints.
Loop has been a Verint® customer for more than 20 years. It required a means
to evaluate large numbers of customer billing inquiries across various criteria,
including importance, agent performance, and customer input. Loop realizedthat customer insights would be difficult, if not impossible, to attain byrandomly sampling small numbers of interactions and evaluating them against
inwardly focused metrics.
“Our main drivers for quality management are two-fold,” says Paul Bentley,
Development Center Manager at Loop. “First, we need to monitor the qualityof service to report regularly and consistently to the industry watchdog,
OFWAT. Second, we want to understand more about our interactions to deliver
an even more rewarding service.”

Solution
Loop has deployed Verint Quality Management™ among its quality support
team (QST), predominantly comprised of coaches, to monitor voice andcorrespondence calls using pre-defined forms integrated into Verint. The QST
also uses the platform for onward coaching, using insights from Verint Quality
Management to develop team member skills, maintain competence, and drivea better customer experience.
All calls are recorded, and approximately 950 billing inquiries are evaluatedevery month, equivalent to about two percent of all customer contacts.
Prior to Verint, Loop used a call monitoring system which had no screen
capture element, making it time-consuming to evaluate customer calls andidentify coaching needs. Evaluations themselves were captured on a separate
sheet, meaning coaches had to use multiple systems to obtain a view ofcustomer interactions.
Today, Verint Quality Management enables the QST to examine every aspectof a customer interaction, including voice conversations and associated screen
data, all from a single, unified screen.

“As a single, unified platform for our people, Verint Quality Management istransforming the Loop customer experience and, in turn, the quality of service
that Yorkshire Water provides to millions of water customers.”
Paul Bentley, Development Center Manager, Loop

A recent initiative is also addressing outmoded forms(almost 50 in total), which previously underpinned quality
monitoring. These forms offered minimal drill-down insight
into the quality of engagement on “soft” skills such asempathy. Moreover, the customer experience, which Loop
calls the “customer promise,” section of the forms wasrelatively small. Loop could only rate the overall experienceon a four-point scale, ranging from “basic” to “exceptional.”“There was very little science behind the questions,” says
Bentley. “The outputs were minimal, and we struggled
to look at skills such as listening, customer empathy, oremotional intelligence.”
The forms have now been streamlined in Verint Quality
Management, with a strong emphasis on the customerexperience. Verint’s team of consultants have supported
Loop with the design of forms, which are carefully built
to provide the desired outputs for reporting purposes.
Loop can now identify the skills frontline advisors need todevelop, such as how well they understand the customer
scenario. A risk-based approach has also been adopted,
scoring high to low, based on the severity of customer
experience impact.
“We can now monitor customer experience far more
effectively,” explains Bentley. For example, we can identify
the contact types driving the calls and why they are driving
the calls.”

Benefits
Loop is reimagining quality management with Verint.
Its forward-thinking customer engagement strategy isdelivering value across the organization:• Meets compliance obligations: OFWAT sets aminimum “confidence grade” that should be attainedby a utility company for a given metric, with a target
confidence grade. Companies like Loop are expected
to improve reporting performance over time, leading
to the target confidence grade or higher. Using Verint
Quality Management, Loop has documented evidence

of engagements, including complaints, repeat calls, andother criteria, which are submitted to OFWAT.
“With Verint Quality Management we can ‘sense check’
our service quality,” notes Bentley. “That customer
experience is verified by independent reports.” Overthe last two years, Loop’s rating on the Institute of theCustomer Service Index has improved by seven places,
meaning they are now ranked fifth and track 5.1 points
above the average utilities score.
• Measures people performance: Previously,
Loop measured performance through two simple
performance indicators, which lacked insight aroundadvisor skill level, or the areas where the process wasfailing. Now, intelligent analysis enables Loop to takea snapshot of new hires’ performance and comparethat with more experienced agents. The team can thenmonitor this on a regular basis, providing coaching as
appropriate.
In response, an innovative project named “Inspired”
has been launched to roll out modern coaching to
all of Loop’s customer-facing people leaders. A oneday customer experience workshop has also beendeveloped, which includes coaching in soft skills like
empathy and active listening. The project has enabled
Loop to jump from a bronze to gold ranking on theInvestors in People (IIP) standard. Agents are now more
empowered to deliver the right solutions when handlingcomplex questions.
• Increases productivity: Loop can automatically
categorize calls that impact the customer experience,
including greetings, escalations, and call hold behavior.
This has resulted in a drop in repeat calls from over 15
percent to 12 percent. Powerful search and filteringfunctionality helps surface data such as high-profile
accounts. Further, the solution can help Loop focus
quickly on the critical parts of the process that drive ahigher value of interactions and take immediate action.
For example, the number of stage 1 billing requests has
reduced by one third.

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