Advertisment

Thames Water picks Xansa for BPO

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

BANGALORE: Xansa, the international business process and IT services company, is successfully delivering the initial phase of a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operation for Thames Water, the world’s third largest water company. This is the world’s first offshore outsourcing of an end-to-end back-office process by a Utility and involves metered billing exceptions and customer correspondence — amounting to over 700,000 transactions each year. Xansa is delivering this service from India, accessing Thames Water systems in the UK remotely.



"Xansa and Thames Water lead the way in offshore BPO within the Utility sector as this deal is the world’s first offshore outsourcing of an end-to-end back-office process. Xansa in India has played a strategic role in delivering integrated offerings in IT services and BPO for our international clients, thus leveraging the cost effectiveness of the Indian delivery capability", said Murali Vullanganti, Managing Director, Xansa India.



Allan Wood, Managing Director, Business Process Outsourcing, Xansa comments: "Xansa shares with Thames Water a strong commitment to customer service and new ways of working. We support their ambition to set the standards by which other water companies are measured. By using our low risk approach to safely transition these customer services processes offshore, we have created an excellent foundation from which to deliver the benefits of BPO to Thames Water, adding a new dimension to our relationship."



Thames Water and Xansa have worked together for over 15 years. As a preferred supplier of IT services, Xansa has supported Thames Water’s transition through de-regulation, its merger with RWE - one of Europe’s largest utility companies - and its e-business developments.



Xansa’s managed BPO operation has reduced costs significantly from day one and guarantees to reduce costs further after six months of full service delivery. Designed as a two-phase service transition, Xansa has exceeded expectations in just one month by completing all planned volumes across both services, and clearing a backlog of an extra 17 per cent of transactions. As a result, Thames Water has also exceeded expectations, freeing up resources for other work earlier than planned.



This BPO initiative is co-ordinated via Thames Water’s dedicated customer services operation in Swindon. Cost savings are achieved by process efficiencies. Maintaining and enhancing the quality of customer service in the UK and Ireland, where Thames Water serves a population of some 13 million, means that Xansa will process around 270,000 items of correspondence each year.



Xansa will also process and resolve around half a million, metered billing exceptions each year. There are over 70 different causes of these exceptions. Xansa’s role is to determine the reason, instigate action and resolve the discrepancy to ensure correct billing for the customer and speedy payment for Thames Water.



Delivering these services to stringent performance measures, Xansa has introduced document capture and imaging, enhancing both security and speed. Over 100 detailed procedures were appraised and documented to create the baseline for a joint process improvement plan. Correspondence is now guaranteed to be successfully processed, within four days ensuring the customer service regulatory targets are met. After three months of live operation the Service Level Agreements shift up a gear with 90 per cent of metered billing exceptions guaranteed to be processed by day one and 100 per cent by day three. In just six weeks Xansa has demonstrated that these targets will be met.

tech-news