Reducing Severn Trent customer calls by 48% through digital transformation

Severn Trent supplies water to around 7.5 million customers across the Midlands. Its customers are as diverse as they come, across every age, background and socio-economic group, including people with learning difficulties.

Origin worked with Severn Trent for more than 15 years, from 2010.

Severn Trent needed to keep a very large and varied customer base happy online. That meant understanding customers' pain points, improving self-service and making digital work hand in hand with complex back-office systems.

A major part of our role has been understanding customer pain and recommending the right mix of communications and services to fix it.

We ran customer experience workshops, testing and design studies, taking ideas through to full prototype. As lead agency, we worked closely with Severn Trent's internal IT teams as part of their team, bringing the expertise they needed to deliver on time and on budget.

Our high-profile work for Severn Trent included writing its five-year digital strategy, launching a new customer service site and portal, and a wide range of web and content work, including the Severn Trent Connect website, welcome pack and direct mail, the intranet and key self-service journeys such as meter reading.

Much of this involved complex technical integration with back-office systems, including CRM, operations and analytics.

We mapped all 650 pages of content onto a new Adobe Experience Manager platform, with extensive user testing to deliver a polished final system.

Our flexible, multidisciplinary team included UX and CX specialists, business data analysts, supply chain experts, e-commerce and sales analysts, database developers and CRM developers. We could be on site at short notice when specialist support was needed most, and became part of Severn Trent's backbone of digital support.

Better digital journeys reduced the need for customers to call, with call volumes down 48%. Customer satisfaction rose by 31% and the online campaign improved brand sentiment.