Newsroom 23 November 2020

We’ve joined British Water!

Digital-first challenges for the water industry

Netcall joins British Water

We are pleased to announce that we have joined British Water as part of a sector initiative bringing disruptive digital technology already delivering significant value in local authority/NHS and financial services towards the utilities sector and its supply chain.

The water market is changing

There’s never been a greater focus on innovation and delivering the best experience for customers and developers. And with Ofwat’s customer measure of experience (C-MeX) and recently introduced developer services measure of experience (D-MeX) greater levels of service are being brought to the forefront of the industry. You can learn more about this in our webinar.

To top this, the COVID-19 effect, Citizens Advice estimate 6m people are behind on water payments as a result of COVID. So how do water companies deal with the surge in the sheer volume of people who now want to contact their water company.

There is a better way…

Technology can be used as a solution to creating better processes, making it easier for customers to for example set up payment plans, access information and for utility providers to process internally. The right use of technology can drive operational efficiency. As well as improve customer experience. But what are your options when implementing software?

You could buy something off the shelf or you can hand-code what you need using traditional methods. There are pros and cons to both. Off the shelf solutions generally won’t meet your exact requirements. They are difficult to get changes made and you end up with a siloed point solution. On the plus side they do offer a lower entry cost. They do not require any pro-development resource (which can be difficult and expensive to get). They are quick to deploy and scale which means the time-to-value is much quicker, and they are generally considered lower risk.

When looking at hand-code as an option, things are quite different. The entry cost is high and it does take expensive developer resource. You often find delivery times extended and some apps just never get built. And this gives rise to using spreadsheets as a solution which are difficult to maintain.

There is an alternative.

With low-code you get the best of both worlds. You get all the benefits of hand-coding a solution plus all the benefits of buying off the shelf.

Liberty Create, part of Netcall’s customer experience platform, is low-code technology that’s perfect for the water sector. Create is an easy to learn and use solution that lets non-technologists (Citizen Developers) build, test and launch applications, to PC, tablet or mobile, without writing code, all under the governance and control of IT.

Sharing is caring

A powerful feature of the Liberty Platform is AppShare. This is where application templates can be shared, for free, between customers for the benefit of all, across many industries with similar needs. A range of utilities specific accelerators are already available – Developer Services, Payment-Support, Remote Inspection, Emergency Alerts, What3words and Surveys. Netcall is constantly seeking new challenges to address, either new functionality or gaps in or between legacy systems.

Get going quickly with Water Launchpad

Take a look at our Water Launchpad. It’s a set of pre-built apps designed to help organisations quickly innovate and improve experiences for customers and developers as well as improving operational efficiencies.

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