Driving the digital service desk experience

Challenge: To transform its service desk support system by significantly reducing the time taken to log tickets, enabling them to refocus on other business priorities such as learning how to drive a material step change in the consumer experience.

Solution: A complete transformation to a data-driven operation and implementation of a virtual agent, CHIP. Deploying automation technology has led to CHIP handling every 1 in 3 contacts to the service desk, while fully resolving 55% of all contacts it handles – allowing their service desk employees to refocus their efforts towards more business and consumer critical issues.

Results:

• 40% improvement in average time to repair
• 30% shift from phone preference to chat/virtual agent
• 55% of service desk contacts are handled without human intervention

Anglian Water is the largest water and utilities company in England and Wales by geographic area, covering 20% of the land area. Every day, they supply 4.3 million people with high-quality drinking water and collect used water from over 6 million people across the region.

Anglian Water’s employees play a vital role in ensuring it can deliver on its purpose, to bring environmental and social prosperity to the region it serves. As part of this, their teams need to ensure a successful delivery of services. A key part of delivery is Anglian Water’s internal service desk, who solve incoming colleagues’ requests. Such requests are varied but largely relate to the provision of technical services such as new IT devices, adding people to distribution lists and new starters. Any delays or issues with these requests could ultimately impact the services they provide.  

Future-proofing Anglian Water’s service desk operations

Anglian Water operates its services in a Service Integration and Management mode (SIAM) and has worked with Capgemini for many years to drive its IT ecosystem. During the last year, Anglian Water reviewed the quality, value for money, and future shape of Capgemini’s services, and how they aligned with the industry/technology in the future. Capgemini needed to give Anglian Water the confidence that they can help move their services towards a more digital focus and better position the business for the future.

A key part of this was transforming Anglian Water’s service desk. Almost 50% of all contact with the service desk was coming in via email, often in an unstructured format making it difficult to classify, prioritise, and report issues without multiple email replies. Typically, this resulted in an average of 2.5 days to log tickets – a time that needed improving.

Virtual agent and automation lead the way for Anglian Water

Working closely with Capgemini’s Integrated Operations Insights Platform, Anglian Water’s first step was to figure out how the service desk was currently operating and analyse opportunities for immediate improvement. This research informed the changes required to the workforce patterns to better align with demand and, most importantly, allowed for goals and targets to be set, which would drive the virtual agent’s (CHIP) capabilities.

Data-led insights established that 80% of the time employees reporting to the service desk only wanted to speak about 10 categories of work: from status updates, logging requests, and reporting problems – giving the project team an early indicator of where efforts needed to be focused. The early adoption of CHIP migrated at scale, but Capgemini’s digital coach and data analytics could quickly show Anglian Water how their colleagues used the service, what their experience looked like, and how higher adoption and value could be brought back to the business. This led to three main priority areas:

• Increase the channel options to access CHIP – this involved integrating CHIP into Anglian Water’s Microsoft Teams – making CHIP a key member of the team. Future plans include integrating CHIP into the voice platform to allow it to handle calls in the same way.

• Provide rapid intuitive access to the most common contacts – by refining the journeys used most, fast-track buttons can be applied to those journeys to ultimately improve the experience of their colleagues by optimising the time to serve.

• End-to-end automation of fulfilment – critical to adoption was making sure that when a request came in, CHIP could deliver either the order number or resolution of any faults that were being reported. The aim was to target the top five faults to validate and drive the adoption rate. The above approach was broken down into a series of MVP/SPRINT cycles to enable a CI/CD type pipeline of improvement to introduce to their employees.

A key part of CHIP’s success relied on the communication and promotion of it with the users of the service in the business. Anglian Water took on a key leadership role here, with their communications team developing a range of material from newsletters, emails, and videos to support the changes with the most appropriate content.

Transformational results and benefits

The implementation of a digital service desk strategy has enabled lower operating costs, improved the levels of service experience, and paved the way for a data-driven approach to actions:

• 40% improvement in average time to repair requests – meaning Anglian Water’s employee’s priorities can shift to better serve their customers
• 30% shift from phone preference to chat/virtual agent
• 30% of all service contacts now come through CHIP, and 55% of these contacts are handled without human intervention

The impact seen through Anglian Water’s user feedback platform, Happy Signals, has validated the introduction of CHIP and the changed approach towards a digital service environment as Anglian Water move to future-proof its operations for the working world of tomorrow today.