Outbound Notification Strategy
Creating a consistent experience across customer notifications
From the bill to a breach notice, we're helping Water Corporation transform its suite of customer notifications.
The challenge?
The customer experience is at risk of becoming inconsistent: siloed teams send notifications on separate systems with limited oversight.
How we helped
Mapping the maze of customer notifications
We mapped the internal process behind the creation of more than 100 different communications across six teams. This provided a central view of notifications, as well as the systems used to create and distribute them.
An actionable content framework
We created a simple framework to categorise notifications based on their predicted impact on the customer. The new framework included templates to dial brand elements ‘up or down’ based on the customer’s context, as well as guidelines to get rid of legislative jargon and government speak.
Transforming content across channels
We're transforming the notification content and design, preparing it to be delivered across channels. Overall, this transition will save the utility an estimated 55% on the cost-to-deploy notifications. When implemented, these savings will be realised by transforming ‘legacy letters’ into emails, SMS and push notifications.
Personalisation drives behaviour change
We're building personalisation recommendations for the transformed content. This means writing behaviourally-informed messages (e.g. social norms), and mapping them to Water Corporation’s customer segments. We've started small, with the aim to scale personalisation sustainably within the business in the long term.
Clarifying process and governance
We're also supporting a new governance structure and process for sending outbound notifications across the business. Introducing new processes takes time, so we're helping transition towards more agile processes slowly but surely.
Data-driven, customer-first decisions
Further, we're recommending business metrics (ROI) and the customer’s voice (VoC) live together in proposed dashboards, so that Water Corporation can move towards making ongoing improvements to notifications.
The Conversion Tracking recommendations are comprehensive; covering everything from paperless-billing adoption to complaint calls and water use reduction. When armed with ROI, staff will be able to improve or stop ineffective notifications, and amplify those that are converting well.
Bringing this intel together will help move the utility from a ‘set and forget’ mentality, to a more agile way of working. Strategic pivot decisions will then be made regularly by frontline employees, rather than via annual reviews with lagging indicators.
Water Corporation values the customer experience. We need to keep pace with customer needs as their expectations keep increasing. We want to provide customers with more information they want, and less of what they don’t.
Karen Willis, Head of Customer Strategy and Engagement
The result?
A better customer experience, at a lower cost.
We helped the utility streamline its processes and weed out inefficient ways of working, reducing overheads and cost-to-serve.
But the real winner here is customers. Water Corporation’s outbound notifications have been vastly improved thanks to the new content framework, the lack of legislative jargon, and proposed dashboards which arm employees with the data and customer feedback to continually improve their communications.