Welsh Water boosts customer satisfaction to 96% by tapping into APIs

Improving internal efficiency and delivering a seamless customer experience

Welsh Water supplies drinking water and wastewater services to Wales and parts of western England. As a not-for-profit company, it is continually looking to reduce costs to taxpayers whilst improving customer experiences.

However, Welsh Water’s front and back-office systems were siloed — which led to time-consuming processes and manual data entry. This increased costs, delayed innovation, and created a poor customer experience.

To deliver on a seamless customer experience, Welsh Water needed to improve operational efficiency by enabling customers to self-serve on common inquiries and automating manual processes for service agents.

Increasing service agent productivity through automation

Using MuleSoft, Welsh Water was able to achieve just that. “MuleSoft enables us to reduce the need for service agents to manually enter data or complete simple transactions. That means they can focus on supporting those who need us most, which ultimately provides a better customer service, and better outcomes for the people of Wales,” explains Kit Wilson, Head of Transformation, Welsh Water.

With Anypoint Platform, the Welsh Water team built an Automatic Verification API that asks customers to provide their address, phone number, and date of birth to verify their own identity. The API then instantly compares that information against Welsh Water’s database to confirm the customer’s identity. For example, when a customer changes their address, Welsh Water can automatically apply that change to their account on its back-end systems — without ever involving a customer service agent.

Achieving a 98% customer satisfaction score

As part of this digital transformation Welsh Water experienced a 80% YoY increase in customers using its self-service capabilities. The success of these digital service capabilities is underscored by Welsh Water’s digital customer satisfaction score, which remains at an all-time high at 96%.