Customer Experience, Accelerate Process Speed – Public Services

Project Date: June 2021

Background: Hunter Water is recognised as a leading water utility company in Australia, with their mission to help the local community to “Love Water”. Customers and suppliers were experiencing issues with the accuracy of invoices, and the subsequent speed to resolve invoice-related issues. Additionally, there were problems with wastewater management, due to the volume of labour-intensive admin processes slowing the identification of issues for resolution.

Solution: Customer Science Group provided an automation assessment along with UiPath-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA) design, transition/ remediation, implementation and support services.

Hunter Water invested in automating three problematic processes:

1. Wastewater Process: Commercial properties have large backflow prevention devices that prevent the risk to public health by potentially putting dangerous things into the public water drinking supply. Annual testing is an Australian Standards compliance measure. This automation reduced manual effort in the management of wastewater, simplifying testing and compliance which resulted in more rapid and targeted action to prevent waste issues.
2. Accounts Payable Invoicing Process: improved accuracy and timeliness of invoice processing, increasing customer and supplier satisfaction.
3. Contact Centre: Change of Customer Details process. With 2500 requests per month being received, the contact centre was unable to get through the backlog having to manually update two systems, resulting in wait times of up to 1 week.

Results: UiPath robots, combined with ABBYY intelligent document processing to digitise invoices for the Accounts Payable process, have returned a significant capacity uplift to Hunter Water’s AP team, improved the Customer Experience relating to customers interacting with the Contact Centre to change their address, and improved testing and compliance practices, thus reducing risk to the public water drinking supply.

• $300,000 FTE equivalent returned to the business in the first two years.
• Commercial backflow prevention device testing and compliance automation minimises risk to the public water drinking supply.