Customer-focused digital strategy

Severn Trent Water

Severn Trent Water provides water and waste services to over 8 million domestic and 210,000 commercial customers spread across the Midlands, Wales and Gloucestershire. They have bold ambitions for their digital relationship with their customers.

They want to:

• Make it simple for customers to self-service their accounts and report or track incidents

• Create goodwill between customers and STW in the communities they serve

• Show their customers they care by engaging in an open and frank dialogue

• Continually demonstrate that they provide a reliable service and great value for money.

They know these ambitions cannot be achieved overnight so they looked for someone to help them develop a digital strategy. In collaboration with bpi, a Midlands-based digital agency, we conducted extensive customer research and consulted at length with key people at STW and their agencies which all led to some serious head-scratching. Through our joint effort and hard work, we grew to understand STW’s specific business challenges and learned how best to overcome them.

The resulting three-year strategic plan supported the STW business vision, but also set out in clear achievable tasks how they could digitally deliver this to their customers. This included the development of a successful strategy for managing customer enquiries via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter; a refreshed and responsive customer-facing website; a segregated PLC website for shareholders and other corporate audiences; and an interactive incident map that has drastically reduced the pressure on their call centre teams. This digital programme is playing an integral part in how STW now do business.