How a sector-first app can cut costs while lifting customer experience
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Challenge
United Utilities is one of the UK’s largest listed water companies, serving 7 million customers – and it had two problems to solve at once. The customer side needed easier access to billing information and clearer communication.
The business side needed a tool its operations team could use to gauge customer satisfaction and track reported water leaks. No water supplier had built a native mobile app before, so there was no template to follow: functionality and user expectations for the sector had to be defined from scratch.
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Solution
United Utilities partnered with Apadmi – the group Droids On Roids is part of – to build it. In-depth profiling of United Utilities’ customers drove the UX, producing an app focused on real, everyday use cases rather than features for their own sake: submitting a meter reading in a dark cupboard (with an automatic torch built in), reporting a leak, paying a bill, or getting in touch with customer services.
The Report a Leak feature let customers register a leak in seconds – submitting images and automatically attaching their exact location – so the operations team could triage by severity, saving time, money, and water. Digital billing pulled customers away from paper: at 0.58p per billing letter, moving people to view bills in the app cut a cost the business was carrying at scale.
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Results
United Utilities set an initial target of 30,000 users in the first year. The app hit it in 10 months, and has since been downloaded more than 100,000 times. It’s now the company’s most actively used payment channel, handling 55,000 to 70,000 payments a month and facilitating £7.5 million in bill payments to date, while reducing call volumes to customer services.
Self-serve payments have driven a 10% reduction in internal costs, and the app has become a central pillar of United Utilities’ ongoing digital transformation.
Recognition
- Customer Service Initiative of the Year – Water Industry Awards 2019
- Customer Engagement Award – Utility Week Awards 2018
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