South East Water UK Goes Live with HiAffinity
DST Global Solutions, a leading provider of billing and customer management solutions, announced that HiAffinity® has been successfully deployed at South East Water Limited.
Following the merger of South East Water and Mid Kent Water, the new organisation was faced with the challenge of integrating two separate customer service and billing operations for 880,000 billable customers. In January this year South East Water successfully went live on a single platform powered by DST Global Solutions’ HiAffinity solution. This has enabled the new organisation to realise benefits from the merger by consolidating to one call centre and implementing consistent business processes across their customer service and billing teams. This successful go live brings to a conclusion a 12 month project that has delivered a consolidated database to reduce the burden of operating two systems, streamlined call centre processes and screens to reduce call times, improved debt recovery processing and improved meter reading exception processing.
“We are very pleased with the way the teams at South East Water and DST Global Solutions have worked together as one seamless project team. We now have a solid platform which enables us to apply consistent, streamlined processes across the shared Customer Service team. We are able to implement changes more quickly and train our users in less time. As well as the significant benefits that we have already realised, this is very much the start of the journey for us. We are very excited about the latest HiAffinity product enhancements around Service Oriented Architecture and work orchestration, which will play a key part in our initiatives to further enhance customer service, lower cost to serve and lower operational risk. We look forward to working in close collaboration with DST Global Solutions and other HiAffinity customers to help shape the future plans for the HiAffinity solution.” said Oliver Martin, Head of Billing and Collections at South East Water.
Ashwin Kumar Das, Managing Director of DST Global Solutions’ billing and customer management business commented, “We are delighted to have been chosen by South East Water and to extend the 20 year relationship that we have enjoyed with the former Mid Kent Water business. The project was significant for HiAffinity and DST Global Solutions on a number of fronts. The successful completion of this complex project involving the consolidation of two disparate systems and operations within a 12 month window for a sizeable customer billing both water and waste underscores DST Global Solutions’ proven track record in delivering successful implementations. South East Water is also the first customer to make use of HiAffinity’s latest supported platform - Oracle relational database management system on the Microsoft Windows operating system. We are very pleased with the benefits that South East Water have realised so far and we look forward to enabling and supporting their future initiatives with HiAffinity.
Retail transformation is a common theme across our global client base with significant emphasis on delivering enhanced customer experience via customer centric, cost efficient and agile operations. HiAffinity supports this by allowing organisations to leverage and respond to customer insight quickly and flexibly through its user configurable business rules engine, workflow capabilities and support for multiple customer interaction channels. In the U.K., impending deregulation and retail separation are also driving the adoption of HiAffinity’s proven competitive market capabilities for the water industry.“
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About South East Water
South East Water provides around 565 million litres of top quality drinking water every day to 2.1 million customers across parts of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Surrey and Berkshire.
About DST Global Solutions
DST Global Solutions is a leading provider of software and services to many of the world’s best known financial, utilities, telecoms and communications organisations. We are a wholly owned subsidiary of DST Systems, Inc. and serve more than 400 client organisations from 16 offices to support our growing client base.
