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Anglian Water - Proactively managing arrears for the UK’s largest water provider

Anglian Water is the largest water company in England and Wales, covering more than 18% of the country. It provides waste and wastewater services to more than five million domestic and commercial customers in the east of England and Hartlepool. The company’s aspiration is to become a frontier company within the water industry.

With increasing indebtedness and unemployment, levels of delinquency have been rising. In the financial year 2007-08 water companies wrote off 1.6% of its revenue as bad debt, over £100 million (source: OFWAT).

In the same year, household revenue which had been outstanding for more than three months had risen by 11% from the previous year to over £1 billion. This is in an industry where customers have no choice of supply and utilities do not have the ability to disconnect services. Therefore the majority of delinquent accounts are still open, running and accruing further debt as the utility tries to recover the outstanding balance. Water companies spent more than £70 million on debt collection activities in 2007 and with the economic crisis affecting households; this figure is expected to rise.

Anglian Water is committed to supporting its customers by ensuring those who have the ability to pay, do, and supporting those who are experiencing hardship. The company was managing debt collection through its billing system. With a desire to make its collections system more effective and efficient, the company recognised that a dedicated collections system could bring significant benefits to the operation.

Following a market review, Anglian Water chose Experian’s Tallyman collections management system. The system has enabled the company to take a pro-active approach to collections, with a far more targeted approach to every customer in order to maximise recovery and minimise write-off, as well as providing the excellent customer service it is committed to.

Experian’s Tallyman system enables Anglian Water to gain insight into delinquent customers through risk scoring and then segmenting them into distinct groups. Tallyman has reduced the cost to collect outstanding debts by automating many of the standard collections processes.

The Tallyman system can reduce average debt by assisting in the recovery of a greater amount of outstanding balances from each customer. Recovery rates also increase with a more intensive focus on actions that will produce results for each individual case, and in addition, staff productivity also increases as collectors become more highly focused on key actions and strategies.

Tallyman consolidates all credit related communications, including phone calls, emails, texts and letters between the organisation and its customers into a single database. This allows businesses to act quickly with delinquency and ensures that the strategy that is delivery is seamlessly implemented across the organisation. The outcome of this is that the customer starts to interact with Anglian Water early in the delinquency cycle and allows appropriate action to be taken quickly.

Results

• Automation of the collections process, leaving staff to work on value-added activities
• Focused strategies so collections staff are concentrated on higher value customers and persistent late payers with a good chance of recovery
• Accurate, current view of overall debt position
• Improved reporting for continual evaluation and improvement of performance
• Performance monitoring of teams and individuals

Martyn Oakley, Customer Services Director, Anglian Water commented."Experian has made us more agile, flexible and effective in our debt recovery strategy. We can now understand our customers in arrears including identifying customers who might be in difficulties and ensure that our contact with them is both personalised and appropriate."

“Experian provided excellent support in implementing and configuring the system for our needs, and has helped us to be more targeted in managing, collecting and reducing customer debt."