Utility Week

Finance & Investment UTILITY WEEK | 27TH OCTOBER - 2ND NOVEMBER 2017 | 23 So customers benefit from instant access, unconstrained by opening hours, and businesses benefit with longer opening hours and by being able to focus their staff on dealing with harder-to-resolve cases requiring more attention. This in turn will save on costs, one of the key outcomes required under PR19, and will improve outcomes for customers by providing a swier response to queries through the bot and enabling a more dedicated resource from agents dealing with complex matters, which can therefore also be dealt with more promptly. Customer engagement As well as customer service, chatbots are already a proven tool for customer engage- ment and feedback. Where paper forms, telephone surveys and even links in emails can be off-putting to customers and receive minimal engagement due to the time and effort required to do them, chatbots offer a much simpler, more interactive and flexible solution. They can be set up to present a snapshot of an issue or problem and then allow a cus- tomer to vote or feed back on how they feel about it. Familiarity of platform, flexibility over the time of day they can be completed plus the versatility of being able to access the mes- senger platforms on any device with inter- net capability means the choice of how to complete the feedback sits squarely with the customer. Given PR19's requirement for businesses to actively encourage participation in decision-making from customers, chatbots offer a resourceful, flexible, digital solution. Reward winning change? While the road to better customer service and improved engagement between water companies and their customers may have some way to go before it catches up with ser- vice-leading sectors such as retail, food and tourism, the future looks bright. Chatbots offer a solution that will aid many of the outcomes described in PR19. We are already working with several water and energy companies to deliver projects in support of these goals, and fully expect oth- ers within the industry to use this exciting technology too. With Ofwat's promise of payment for results and its desire to see more companies exploit new digital technology, chatbots could be a wise investment on more than one level. Paul Shepherd, chief executive, We Build Bots Case study: Welsh Water Welsh Water is the UK's only not-for-profit water company. Every day it supplies 1.4 million homes and businesses in Wales and Herefordshire with more than 828 million litres of water, as well as cleaning wastewa- ter so it can be returned to rivers and seas. The fourth-largest company in Wales with over 3,000 employees, its not-for-profit status means that instead of rewarding shareholders, any profits made are reinvested into the business for the benefit of customers. Involving customers in decision-making has been a core focus for the business over the past 12 months and its latest campaign, "Have Your Say", was designed to gather the views of more than 20,000 customers to help inform strategic plans for the future and ensure the business can deliver an even better service. The Have Your Say campaign used a number of tools to present information and gather feedback from customers, including: TV and radio ads; turning a disused shipping container into a "water bar" and taking it to festivals to gather direct feedback; a series of "reservoir vlogs" which received over 300,000 views on YouTube; a website and, perhaps most excitingly, a world and industry first: a Welsh-English bilingual chatbot. The chatbot, built by We Build Bots, operates on Facebook mes- senger and was designed to reach demographic groups that are traditionally less likely to have their say – including young people and centennials, who are becoming customers in their own right for the first time. The chatbot itself is relatively simple. First it presents information on a range of issues, for example flood and pollution risks, education programmes, paying more for water to subsidise those in financial dif- ficulty, cleaning up beaches, water quality, colour and taste. It then asks respondents to rate using emojis on a scale of 1 to 5 how important each area is to them as a customer. As well as being a world first, the chatbot enabled outreach to a wider demographic of customers, meaning the views received were supremely valuable. Feedback received via the chatbot during the "have your say" will actively inform the future strategy of Welsh Water, making it a successful investment now and for the future.

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