Business Impact Summary
American Water, the largest water resources company in North America, reinvented the way it serves its approximately 18 million customers by using Ventyx Service Suite to transform the way its more than 1,000 field service representatives deliver customer service. The solution enabled faster response times, eliminated redundancy and repeat visits, and has helped to improve overall customers satisfaction.
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The Company
Founded in 1886, American Water is the largest water resources company in North America, serving more than 18 million people and generating revenues in excess of $2 billion. With operations across 29 states and 3 Canadian provinces, the company owns and/or operates 57,500 miles of water main distribution systems, 7,800 miles of sewer pipe for collection systems, 869 water treatment plants, and 271 wastewater treatment plants. Prior to 2004, this far-reaching, complex utility was operating a paper-based order distribution system that was seriously hampering their service delivery and compromising customer relationships.
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The Challenge
As customer service becomes a high-profile component of a water service company's business strategy, utilities are grappling with the challenge of delivering exemplary customer service while maximizing operational efficiency and maintaining high quality standards. To this end, American Water launched its Service First project with the Service Suite mobile workforce management solution in 2004, transforming the way more than 1,000 field service representatives deliver customer service.
"The implementation of mobile workforce management has reinvented the way American Water serves its customers," said John Young, Chief Operating Officer at American Water. "It has enabled faster response times, eliminated redundancy and repeat visits, and is ultimately improving overall customer satisfaction."
Drivers for Change
Field Service Representatives (FSRs) at American Water are responsible for field customer service work such as water connection and disconnection, meter replacement or repair, leak inspections, line locating, meter reading, and pressure checks for approximately 18 million people. American Water's paper-based service order distribution system seriously hindered the timeliness and efficiency of this field work. Hand-sorting of service orders into afternoon, morning, sewer, and water categories wasted hours of valuable time.
Before mobile workforce management was implemented, FSRs picked up paper orders each morning and mailed completed orders back to the office where they were manually closed. The opportunity for error and loss of orders was high, and FSRs and Field Resource Coordination Centers (FRCC) had no information to respond to order status inquiries from customers. Before Service Suite, the utility could only offer all-day appointment windows, and customers would have to make themselves available all day waiting for an FSR to arrive. In addition, there was no electronic mechanism in place to track valuable information such as the location of FSRs, time management, or order status.
Recognizing the limitations and detrimental impact of its operational systems and processes, American Water launched the Service First project.
Service First is the initial phase of American Water's STEP (Standardized Technology Enabled Processes) program, which aims to deliver a coordinated and integrated approach to improve customer service and change the way the company works using fully integrated technology. The Service First mission is "to provide highly responsive customer service were everyone works with the most current information to ensure that each job is completed by the right person at the right time."
Service First goals included:
- Increased customer satisfaction by delivering highly responsive service and ensuring each job is completed by the right person at the right time
- Improved business efficiency through increased productivity and reduced costs
- Better resource utilization – people, technology, and information
- Deliver business plan commitment to improve customer service while maintaining or lowering operational expenses.
Achievement of these goals rested squarely on the implementation of the Service Suite mobile management workforce system to streamline operations and deliver improved customer relations through efficient, responsive service.
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The Solution
As Service First kicked off, Service Suite r7.5 (baseline) was rolled out across the U.S. in a phased approach. Rollout began in July 2004 in the Northeast Region and Southeast Region in October 2004, followed by the Central and Western Regions in January 2005, and July 2005 respectively. To date, Service Suite has been implemented in four regions across 17 American Water companies in 17 states.
A Train-the-Trainer approach was used to get the workforce up and running on the Service Suite system. Dave Ward, a Network Supervisor for Pennsylvania American Water, commented, "Training was handled well here in the Southeast Region. Rather than having an outside person training the end users, the smartest thing we did was to train employees who will actually use the system and they came back to train the rest, which helped in making the FSRs feel more comfortable learning the tools."
A Specialist in the Northeast Region FRCC in Belle Mead, New Jersey, Leigh Perez has a bird's eye view of how mobile workforce management has enhanced delivery of customer field service. As part of the Region that first rolled out Service Suite, she witnessed how operations, the FRCC, the Customer Service Center, and the project team came together to better manage and improve on issues identified in the “lessons learned” sessions.
According to Perez, "The Northeast Region had the largest list of complaints about the system and the process, but as resistance to change diminished and issues were addressed, we found that lessons learned from our experience in the Northeast helped the Southeast Region to have a smoother rollout, and likewise for the next region."
Today, the Service Suite system at American Water automates the work order cycle – scheduling, dispatching, and managing an average of 155,000 field service orders per month. American Water uses three order types – Customer Service, Transmission and Distribution, and Plant/Production – and approximately 85 job codes to manage operations work. Work orders are passed to Service Suite from two separate hosts: SAP for Customer Service, Transmission and Distribution, and Plant/Production for Elizabethtown Water district, and ORCOM for Customer Service work in all other districts.
Field Service Coordinators (FSC) use Service Suite Appointment Booking to schedule three-hour appointment windows based on individual skill sets, location, and availability, ensuring FSRs arrive at the customer site on time with the right tools to complete the job the first time.
Equipped with Panasonic Toughbooks and GPS devices in their vehicles, FSRs receive service orders remotely. Since American Water operations are spread across the U.S, Service Suite supports multiple wireless communication providers, including Verizon, ATT, Sprint, Cingular, and Wireless Matrix (satellite); mobile workers can roam automatically between networks without any intervention or interruption in communication.
As work progresses, FSRs send order completion information wirelessly back to the enterprise, instantly updating the customer's record. Customer Service Representatives at the call centers now have access to up-to-date information on service order status and can respond efficiently to customer inquiries.
Service order status is monitored in real-time, with automatic warnings signaling the need for immediate attention by the coordination centers, enabling more responsive service and allowing supervisors to spend more time in the field working with field service reps to improve productivity. By monitoring FSR status, FRCC staff can “drop” additional work – often value-added work such as zero consumption, meter changeout, or collections – when it is anticipated that the FSR will have available time. Service Suite is linked with American Water's billing and collections software to facilitate more timely and accurate billing. And, when payment is received in connection with Shutoff for Non-Payment orders, FSRs can get the water turned back on more expediently, avoiding Board of Public Utilities (BPU) penalties and improving customer relations.
Customer Care
Karen Cooper, Manager of Business Services at the American Water Customer Service Center in Alton, IL, has been in the water industry for 28 years and knows first-hand the frustrations customers experienced before mobile workforce management made real-time information available.
"The speed of our response to customers is significantly improved,” Cooper said. “With Service Suite, we now have technology in place that provides real-time information about completed orders and enables the Customer Service Center to provide accurate and timely information to relay to customers about the status of their work order."
Dan Farabee, an FSR with Pennsylvania American Water, acknowledges the benefits of mobile workforce management in handling customer emergencies and time-critical orders. "The response time to customer emergencies is the most noticeable improvement to field customer service operations. We can respond now in a flash."
If a customer calls with a leak in their basement, FRCCs have the location, individual skill sets, and availability of all field technicians at their fingertips and can rapidly assign and dispatch the order wirelessly to the most appropriate technician.
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The Result
Prior to launching the Service First project, American Water manually measured performance and productivity. Now with Service Suite Decision Support (ADS), standard and user-defined reports enable management to measure benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPI), such as FSR productivity, dispatch efficiency, the number of missed appointments, and the ratio of completed versus assigned orders; current and historical data can be tracked for metrics such as job duration, travel time, and idle time. In addition, access to relevant historical data has improved the company's forecasting and planning capabilities.
By transforming the utility's field customer service operations, Service Suite has increased productivity, reduced costs, and – most importantly – heightened customer satisfaction.
- Decreased “wrench time” through fewer repeat visits and increased single-visit completion of customer requests
- Improved, faster response to emergency orders
- Minimized overtime hours through improved monitoring, increased work completion rate, and fewer repeat visits
- Fewer complaints to state utility commissions and avoidance of BPU penalties due to responsive service and satisfied customers
- Reduced staff requirements (telex management, closers, dispatch, planning and scheduling)
- More time spent in field by field supervisors to help improve FSR productivity
- Improved FSR safety through GPS monitoring in the field
Although there is no data prior to the implementation of Service Suite with which to compare current performance metrics, American Water realized productivity benefits from the initial rollout of mobile workforce management and continues to improve.
Post-implementation performance and productivity benefits realized over a one-year period:
- Emergency orders – average minutes from dispatch to completion decreased from 398 minutes to 147 minutes
- Met appointments increased from 86% to 90%
- Idle time reduced from 35% to 7%
- Orders/day/FSR increased from 16 to 26
- Average travel time per order reduced from 8.3 minutes to 7.4 minutes
Looking to the Future
With today's public demanding more from their water utility than ever before, superior customer service is critical to survival. American Water is focused on maximizing its service delivery and will continue to leverage Service Suite to fulfill its operational and customer service goals. The utility plans to increase productivity through scheduling enhancements to complete more scheduled customer appointment work, and is evaluating "home basing" of FSRs to further increase productivity. Further enhancements may include rolling Service Suite out to meter readers to work certain order types, incorporation of additional work types (water quality, distribution, new service investigation, leak detection) into the Service Suite system to monitor productivity more effectively, and taking advantage of scheduling using GPS to decrease travel time and improve productivity.
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