DC Water provides water to the 680,000 residents and 20 million annual visitors in the Washington D.C. area, as well as all the federal buildings in the District of Columbia, monitoring in excess of 135,000 meters. It also provides wastewater services to the District and surrounding counties.
DC Water wanted a tier-one solution that would allow it to not only engage its customers today, yet also adapt to an increasingly complex market landscape. That meant the solution needed to scale as well as integrate well with other business systems. It had to be agile enough to grow and evolve as the customer demands increase, while providing a minimum of 20 years of useful life to the utility.
Given DC Water’s business and its service territory, security is also a top concern. The solution, therefore, had to provide robust controls for accessing, storing and processing customer and financial data, including appropriate authorization, review and approval processes to ensure the integrity of the data.
Delivering the new customer experience well in advance of the larger CIS and mobile work management solutions significantly reduced the risk of the implementation. This allowed customers to become familiar with the new applications long before any changes to the back-end solutions were made. Call Center staff could focus on addressing specific customer experience issues without simultaneously transitioning to a new system, reducing overall stress to staff while not adversely impacting wait times.
ResultsNot only was DC Water’s implementation and deployment done in record time—reducing the overall cost—it allowed the company to see some immediate benefits in the first month of the new system’s life.
Back Office Benefits
The CIS implementation is only the first major milestone in a continuing partnership between DC Water and VertexOne, but it will save DC Water an estimated $22 million over the seven-year contract. Over the remainder of the contract and beyond, the two companies will continue working together to plan and execute a number of exciting new programs to further enhance the overall customer experience platform.
