South East Water has upgraded its customer management platform to make interactions easier.
The system means functionality to enhance customer service experience can be built into the system including automated operations processes where feasible.
Mary Sabalis, head of business systems at South East, said technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence will be key to the company achieving its 2020-25 business plans, which centre around innovation and optimising customer interaction.
“We knew that moving to the cloud was the most important step in the journey to unlock a number of doors in the way we work internally and externally, and it will allow us to be creative in how we communicate with our customers,” Sabalis said.
“Creating the infrastructure where our customers can report a leak using their phones, and having Google Cloud’s machine learning technology automate the workflow, will play an important role in how we optimise operations. It will allow us to free up our customer service teams so they can focus on more detailed queries.”
CTS said the huge amounts of data collected from water customers through meter reading and billing can be stored centrally and accessibly to inform strategic business decisions.