Scale at Speed™
Personalised Campaign Management for Water Utilities: Driving Business Success
Enabling Water Utilities to Enhance Engagement, Optimise Costs, and Strengthen Customer Trust
The Voice of the Water Utility Customer: A Daily Struggle
"Water falls freely from the sky, so why am I paying for it?" - This question echoes the frustration of many customers who feel disconnected from the value they receive. Their concerns go far beyond billing. They’re navigating a maze of uncertainty, often without clear answers or support.
Voice and Sentiment: A Dual Perspective
Beneath every contact is a more profound emotional truth. Here's what customers are saying, and what they truly experience:
| Customer Voice | Underlying Sentiment |
|---|---|
| “I don’t even know the status of my complaint or request.” | Customers feel unheard and left in the dark. |
| “I must take a day off work because field engineers might visit my home.” | Poor communication disrupts livelihoods and creates unnecessary stress. |
| “I reported the issue, but no one has come yet.” | Delayed action leads to frustration and a sense of being ignored. |
| “I don’t know when my service will be restored. I have chronically ill family members at home—I need to plan!” | Service uncertainty creates real-life risks and emotional distress. |
| “As I get older, reading my bills is harder. I need someone to explain them to me.” | Older customers need accessibility and compassionate support. |
| “I just lost my job. I’m scared I won’t be able to pay my bills. What happens then?” | Financial hardship brings fear—not just of debt, but of losing essential services. |
| “I always pay my bills. Doesn’t that mean I deserve better service?” | Loyalty is overlooked; customers crave acknowledgment and personalised care. |
| “I know water is precious and should be conserved, but what can I do as just one person?” | Customers want to help, but they need practical guidance. |
These concerns may seem trivial to some, but they represent the lived reality of countless water utility customers. And when the only recourse is to reach out for help, contact centres become overwhelmed, driving up operational costs and straining resources.
Why Campaign Management is Essential
The voices of your customers are clear: they’re not just asking for water - they’re asking to be seen, heard, and supported proactively. And that’s where campaign management becomes not just a strategy, but a necessity.
As a water utility provider, you deliver a service that is both vital and deeply personal. That’s why it’s no longer enough to respond simply; you must anticipate. You must connect. You must care.
In today’s tech-driven world, industries such as energy, telecom, and banking have adopted customer-centric models that combine innovation with empathy. Meanwhile, the Water Utility sector has often found itself caught in a balancing act, trying to modernise while keeping costs low and meeting strict regulatory guidelines. The result? A widening gap between what customers expect and what they experience.
But this gap is not insurmountable. As the service industry continues to evolve, so too do customer sentiments and expectations, which now call for immediate, transparent, and genuinely rewarding experiences at affordable prices. Given the evolving expectations of customers and advancements in technology, it is essential to leverage your years of industry expertise in conjunction with the right technological innovations. This approach will enable you to provide customers with service standards that are modern and beyond just automation; it’s about creating experiences that are:
- Inclusive: Designed for everyone, regardless of age, ability, or digital access. Whether it’s readable bills for seniors or support in local languages, accessibility is non-negotiable.
- Personalised: Every household has different needs. Communications must reflect individual usage patterns, preferences, and concerns, rather than relying on broad assumptions.
- Trustworthy: Transparency builds confidence. Clear updates, honest timelines, and two-way communication show that the utility respects the customer’s time and trust.
- Affordable: Supporting customers in managing their consumption, providing reminders, and offering flexible payment options helps reduce financial strain without compromising service quality.
- Empathetic: Behind every complaint is a lived experience. Campaigns must recognise the emotional context. Regardless of whether it's worry, confusion, or urgency, you must respond accordingly.
- Environmentally Conscious: Water Utilities must empower customers to contribute to sustainability with actionable insights, conservation tips, and community-based initiatives.
Doing it the TechM Way
To accomplish this, Tech Mahindra has developed an extensive catalogue for Campaign Management that integrates technology and industry expertise with human intellect, as we believe that technology should amplify human touch, not replace it. That’s why our Campaign Management solution is built to listen, to learn, and to lead with purpose.
The key operational challenges we focus on and strive to mitigate include:
- Frequent Service Disruptions: Caused by aging infrastructure, limited innovation, complex repairs, extreme weather events, and a general lack of public awareness
- Eroding Customer Experience: Driven by shifting demographics, rapid technological changes, skill gaps, disconnected systems, and rising service expectations.
- Barriers to Priority Service Access: Due to outdated data, manual processes, low awareness, and a lack of proactive outreach.
- Delayed Payments and Collection Challenges: Resulting from late billing, unclear bill formats, inconsistent payment behaviour, limited payment options, and reactive engagement.
- Unaccounted Properties and Service Gaps: Poor data quality, fragmented verification methods, and legal or social constraints create blind spots in service delivery, especially in new developments, property splits, or mergers.
- Affordability Concerns: High per capita consumption, revenue leakage, bad debt accumulation, regulatory pressure, and low customer education.
Tech Mahindra’s Approach: Digital Campaigns, Human-centred Design
Our approach to campaign management encompasses a comprehensive strategy that includes multiple phases: planning, execution, monitoring, analysis, and campaign refinement. We utilise cost-effective, new-age technology channels for proactive communication, such as conversational AI platforms, virtual bot assistants, automated text messages, social media, customised voice messages, personalised videos, FAQ design, and many more.
The primary aim of this initiative is to facilitate proactive and customised personalised communication that educates, engages, and empowers customers, ultimately striving to minimise additional costs for you while enhancing the overall customer experience. At Tech Mahindra, we view campaign management as more than a communication function—it’s a strategic tool for building trust, reducing operational strain, and enhancing the customer experience. We structure every campaign across five critical phases:
- Strategic Planning: We identify customer segments, service pain points, and high-impact moments. The goal is to design effective communications and identify opportunities for engagement.
- Clear Goal Setting and Metrics Alignment: Each campaign is tailored to achieve specific outcomes, such as improving on-time payments, increasing digital adoption, or reducing contact centre volumes. We ensure these goals align with broader business objectives and regulatory requirements.
- Smart Segmentation and Audience Understanding: We don’t treat customers as a monolith. Through behavioural and demographic analysis, we tailor messaging that reflects the needs and expectations of different personas, including tenants, senior citizens, and low-income households.
- Channel and Content Optimisation: From conversational AI and automated SMS to personalised video and multilingual voice bots, we choose the most effective mix of tools based on your audience’s preferences and access.
- Execution, Monitoring, and Iteration: We don’t stop at launch. Each campaign is monitored in real-time, with performance metrics guiding agile refinements. This ensures that communication stays relevant, efficient, and cost-effective over time.
Turning Concept into Action: Our Campaign Catalogue
Our Campaign Management Catalogue is designed to do one thing: make life easier for your customers and your operations team. It combines a suite of ready-to-deploy, cost-effective communication templates and tools tailored to the specific needs of water utilities with a perfect blend of technology and human intellect.
From outage alerts and billing reminders to conservation nudges and service updates, each campaign is built to:
- Reduce inbound contact volume
- Improve first-time resolution
- Encourage timely payments
- Promote sustainable consumption
- Deliver a consistent, empathetic customer experience
Visualising every stage of the customer journey, the catalogue offers pre-configured campaign flows that address key moments of interaction so you can scale your outreach without reinventing the wheel.
Figure 1: CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT CATALOGUE
Campaign Management with Purpose
Customer concerns go beyond operations; they shape trust and satisfaction. Addressing them requires proactive and empathetic engagement. Our campaign management bridges expectations and service excellence, enabling personalised outreach and meaningful communication. With over 20 years of expertise, we deliver tailored solutions that boost performance and customer experience. Our campaign management integrates technology and human insight to create transparent, inclusive interactions. From strategic planning to performance tracking, every step reduces strain and improves satisfaction.
The future of utility services lies in empathy, innovation, and sustainability, and we help lead with purpose.
