To improve customer service in the industry, the water regulator placed a significant portion of service providers’ revenue at risk to performance against Customer KPIs. Our client, which had been bought by a Private Equity house as a long-term cash generating asset with a focus on maximising cash flow, had a new and additional challenge – how to improve customer service and cash flow, while overcoming limited visibility of the cost and operational levers that it needed. David acted as a subject matter expert on the team putting in place operational reporting to provide the missing visibility and enable these challenges to be met.
The PwC team developed a balanced scorecard for reporting, including requirements for new granularity on the unit costs of processing customer contact and service level reporting. David worked with the client team to develop methods to generate unit cost data per customer service transaction. These were developed using the average time to process each item, using the average time to process, captured from a variety of sourced identified by David, and the cost per productive minute of front line staff that processed the customer service workload. This approach allowed two forms of benchmarking and operational control, firstly using cost per productive minute allowed internal and external benchmarking to assess efficiency of resources and resource management. Secondly, processing times allowed both scrutiny of the steps in each process to identify savings and comparison to other organisations for similar tasks.
David’s work helped the client identify how much ‘fat’ was within its existing cost base, facilitating the development of performance improvement initiatives, the benefits of which could be used to fund both shareholder demands for EBITDA and initiatives to ensure customer experience was improved to reduce the risk of regulatory fines.