New Design Reduces Call Volumes To Customer Service

Southern Water’s new invoice design

Following the eye tracking analysis and the input received from the focus groups, Southern Water not only changed the design and layout of the bills, but also the sequence of the information and the content of the texts.

The front page states clearly how much the customer has to pay. There is also a box containing the key messages that Southern Water wants to communicate to the customer. For example, whether water consumption has risen or fallen since the last period.

Page two shows the full calculation that produced the final total. It also includes the various tariffs used and the customer’s consumption.

Pages three and four are used to describe all of the products available. This is also where they decided to put contact details and the like.

Every day, Southern Water supplies the south of England with 535 million litres of drinking water and collects and recycles 700 million litres of waste water. With thousands of kilometres of pipelines requiring continuous maintenance and demands to secure water supplies for the future, the company is facing major challenges.

“We foresee major costs in future because of climate change. But ideally we’d like to cope with that without too much of an increase in the price we charge our customers,” says Andrea Chew, who is Production Print and Post Manager.

Southern Water, like all water companies, currently has a monopoly in the market and customers themselves are unable to choose the supplier.

“But that’s changing too, for commercial customers. And even though it’s difficult at the moment to predict what a competitive market will be like, communication and customer care will of course become even more important,” says Andrea Chew, explaining that Southern Water’s current business plan is based on their being easy to buy services from, easy to communicate with and a supplier of products and services at competitive prices.

To read more click Here