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26 January 2006
Thames Water, the world's third largest water company, has renewed its contract with outsourcing and technology expert Xansa for the delivery of its back-office billing exceptions and customer correspondence processes. The move comes as the utilities company continues to push for excellent customer service and greater efficiencies.
Under the agreement, Thames Water has extended its business process outsourcing agreement by a further 22 months, impressed by Xansa's grasp of its business, coupled with the company's highly successful onshore/offshore approach to service delivery. Xansa handles around 700,000 customer interactions each year including disputed bills and correspondence.
Over the last 2 years, Xansa has greatly reduced the time taken to answer customer queries and resolve billing exceptions, improving the utilities company's cash flow. As part of its efficiency drive, Xansa has introduced a string of new processes to drive down costs including document capture and imaging which enhanced both security and speed of transactions.
Although transaction volumes have more than tripled since the start of the contract, from around 500,000 to 1,700,000 pa, Xansa has met or exceeded all the original targets for cost, flexibility, quality and risk management. As well as reaping the benefits of the guaranteed cost savings, Thames Water can be confident that correspondence will be successfully processed within four days ensuring the customer service regulatory targets are met.
"The renewal of our contract pays tribute to the depth of understanding that Xansa has built up about our business," said Phil Scholes, Customer Services Director, Thames Water.
The company's dual shore approach to outsourcing has delivered tremendous savings while maintaining and enhancing the high levels of customer service. This has enabled us to free up resources for deployment elsewhere within the business. Outsourcing these processes to Xansa has supported Thames Water in its drive to deliver the highest standards of water supply and management at the most competitive price.
Xansa continues to generate savings for Thames Water thanks to its sector expertise as well as its dual-shore approach to outsourcing. The BPO initiative is co-ordinated via Thames Water's dedicated customer services operation in Swindon, with many of the services delivered from India through remote access to the utilities company's UK-based systems. Cost savings are achieved by process efficiencies.
"Our relationship with Thames Water demonstrates key elements of our Utilities strategy in action." said Carl Haigney, General Manager of Utilities at Xansa. "Xansa is working across the sector to enable our clients to do more with their resources and IT, through the operation of key processes and systems in a tightly regulated, time critical environment."
Thames Water and Xansa have worked together for over 15 years with successful implementations of BPO and IT programmes. This programme is an extension to the world's first end to end offshore process outsource for a utilities company.
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