Revenue Growth
The biggest negative impact on our client’s revenue and the reason it was stagnant was coming from these factors:
Due to a prolonged period of either not receiving any water bills or receiving incorrect water bills, consumer’s trust in the system was declining rapidly
Consumers living outside the core urban areas were not receiving bills at all and hence weren’t paying either, this constituted more than 40% of non-paying consumers
A large number of consumers (approx. 15000) had pending issues with the water department and without any process of resolving them, were neither entertaining new bills nor were making payments
Non-metered and unauthorized consumers
Inability of billing everyone properly was generating resistance from the political lobby, who were not allowing the department to raise their water rates from a decade
Improvements in Bill Distribution
Through our ability of merging technology with expert domain knowledge, we were able to maintain a consistent growth in distribution without a rapid increase in the number of people involved in field operations.
We identified the key problem areas and then used technology and data analytics to find the most optimum and efficient ways of deploying our work force to fix the issues in a swift and systematic manner.
Boost in Consumer On-boarding
We rolled out several processes which enhanced consumer experience and brought it at par with the kind of services they are used to in private sector. Not just the process of new consumer introduction, we made it easier to identify and integrate unauthorized/non-metered consumers and developed operations which took care of disputes, bill rectification, complaint management and meter installation.
Demand vs Recovery
We know this from our experience that to increase the incoming revenue, it is always better to enhance the quality of service instead of penalizing the end user. Citizens respond to this very quickly and we have seen this first hand when the quality of service was up to the mark and provided citizens multiple options of payments to ease their resistance, the response always met the demand
Reduction in Non Metered Consumers
Reduction in Incorrect Bills
This was the area of biggest challenge for our client. A disproportionate number of complaints related to incorrect or missing bills, several disputes resulting in non-payment and court action, and no proper way to mitigate or even address these issues. We provided them with proper channels of logging, tracking and resolving these complaints, introduced a smart bill correction system to take care of historical disputed bills first and then the routine issues.
In addition to that, using data analytics, we provide such detailed insights to our field staff, that it completely mitigated the problem of recording erroneous readings or unreliable data from field. This resulted in long queues on payment counter instead of complaint counter.