RPA accelerates customer onboarding and lowers costs at Business Stream

Business Stream is one of the largest water retailers in the UK. It supplies non-domestic customers with water and waste water services sites across Scotland and England.

Monday, 2nd July 2018 Posted 6 years ago in by Phil Alsop

In advance of the opening of the English retail water market in April 2017, Business Stream acquired Southern Water’s non-household customer base, doubling the size of its business. With increased competition and a changing regulatory landscape, the company turned to Capgemini to help enhance its onboarding process for large, multi-site customers.

Business Stream realised that it had a significant opportunity for growth following the opening of the English market. It also recognised that to capitalise on this opportunity it needed to enhance its processes to ensure it could provide a seamless onboarding experience for its new, multi-site customers. Realising that its existing systems involved a high level of manual interaction across many repetitive tasks, Capgemini recommended Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as the ideal solution to reduce costs and improve accuracy. RPA enables software to perform multiple tasks across different applications without reverting to human input.

Working closely with Business Stream’s experts, Capgemini captured the end-to-end process and used that insight to iteratively develop, demonstrate, test and deploy the software robots. This enabled the company to ensure that it was effectively replacing manual activity with autonomous systems. The system was also integrated with Salesforce, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, to store account opening data and track progress.

RPA has greatly reduced the level of human interaction needed in the repetitive and time-consuming process of opening an account. This reduces errors and frees up staff to focus on areas where they can add value for customers. The account management team also benefits from rapid access to the information they need to have more detailed conversations with potential customers. This helps to improve service levels and accelerates time taken to identify and then convert an opportunity.

Management information is now more accurate and reporting more effective, with clear tracking of each account’s progress. With the robotics solution in place, Business Stream can now take over the operation and maintenance themselves, enabling them to refine and improve the system as their needs change.

“The use of Artificial Intelligence through RPA is ground-breaking and bold within the retail water sector. We are always looking to introduce new and innovative ways to deliver improvements for our customers and it was fantastic to be working with Capgemini on such an exciting project. We recognise the importance of providing all of our customers with a smooth onboarding experience and the introduction of RPA provides us with the right technology and tools to achieve this”.

Jo Mayes, Director of Customer Operations, Business Stream