Nexus Water's Cohesive Customer Experience and Targeted Communications Solution

Originally founded in 1891 and headquartered in Sugar Land, Texas, Nexus Water Group utility subsidiaries own and operate regulated water and wastewater systems that serve over 600,000 residential and business customers. These subsidiaries include 15 separate lines of business and span five states—Alabama, California, Oregon, South Carolina, and Texas—each of which is broken down into multiple districts.

5 STATES AND 15 BRANDS UNITED IN A SINGLE CUSTOMER PORTAL

 

57,000+ USER PROFILES MIGRATED

 

150,000+ CIS ACCOUNTS, COMMUNICATIONS PREFERENCES AND OTHER DATA MIGRATED

 

9-MONTH IMPLEMENTATION, START TO FINISH

CHALLENGES AND GOALS

The primary goal for every employee at Nexus Water Group is to deliver water and wastewater services in a safe, reliable way while providing the most positive customer experience possible. As customer expectations evolved, delivering on this promise became a moving target. Nexus embarked upon a project to consolidate its multiple customer portals into a single, unified, and modern solution that would provide its customers across all lines of business the greatest self-service solutions.

Their leadership also recognized the need to provide its internal customer service teams with more efficient, scalable, and automated ways to communicate with its customers.

UNIFYING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

To realize this vision, they identified a number of goals. First, to enhance the customer experience through a flexible, extensible and scalable customer-facing portal enriched with robust self-service, personalization and branding capabilities. Second, to empower staff by automating previously manual processes and communications between the utility and its customers. Third, to reduce operational costs and boost operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Nexus Water Group began looking for a long-term technology partner that would support them in achieving these goals.

They selected our team as their partner to deliver world-class customer experiences for staff and their customers.

VertexOne’s decades of experience providing world-class modern technology and customer experience solutions for utilities is one of the key reasons this project went so smoothly and why we’re happy to have become long-term partners. All our subsidiary utilities, their staff and their customers love the result. Their platform is scalable and flexible to support our strategy for sustained growth through many future acquisitions.

— Jeff Farney, Nexus Water Group (formerly known as Southwest Water Company)

SELECTING A SOLUTION

Our team worked closely alongside Nexus staff to define detailed requirements to meet the utility’s vision, its business goals, and its customers’ needs. Then, we proposed our customer engagement products (now known as VXconnect) to meet their unique needs and growth requirements.

THIS SOLUTION OFFERED ENHANCED FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY FOR STAFF AND CUSTOMERS INCLUDING:

• Multilingual support to facilitate communication with a diverse population
• Business-based branding to provide each subsidiary its own recognized identity
• Targeted messaging to allow each communication or campaign to be sent to the appropriate customers
• Rotating banners to keep the portal experience fresh and accommodate multiple offers and features
• Temperature data overlay to provide location-specific data and daily insights
• Social bill comparison to let customers see how their water consumption stacks up against others in their area

CUSTOMER INSIGHTS

By using our customer engagement engine, formerly known as Customer Advantage™, Nexus would gain a single customer engagement interface with robust, consistent functionality for all customers, yet be individually branded for each subsidiary.

ADMIN DASHBOARD

Our configurable admin dashboard would provide advanced features such as content management, single sign-on from SAP to manage customer profiles, and proxy logins to allow CSRs to view the customer portal exactly as customers do for quick and easy troubleshooting. Further, its reporting on customer activity would provide Nexus detailed insights into customer behaviors.

OUTBOUND COMMUNICATION

With our outbound communication engine, formerly known as Communication Advantage™, Nexus would be able to automate communications to its customers. The system’s repository for correspondence template management and version history would allow them to generate and send SMS and email communications from a singular system. Further, its integration with their CIS meant eliminating the need

for customer service teams to manually identify customer accounts to individually communicate with their customers.

Instead of spending resources on door hangers or generic inserts, Nexus would be able to easily search for a particular target audience from their 15 lines of businesses and send personalized communications with just a few clicks.

RESULTS FOR NEXUS WATER GROUP

Thanks to our up-front alignment of goals, we continue to provide the best experience for both customers and staff. Nexus continues to provide the best possible experience for both customers and staff. By leveraging modern technology, best practices, our customer communication engine, and deployment methodology, the implementation went live with a fully tested and accepted solution—providing all the mentioned features and more in only nine months.

Nexus now defines templates for each different communication need, including sending automated customers payment reminderson a daily basis. As a result, the utility is seeing high levels ofcustomer response to reminders and an increase in on-time payments—made even easier by the reliable, easy-to-use payment options available.

Our in-depth requirements analysis, data analysis, and rigorous testing—not to mention its depth of experience and unique project methodology—resulted in an implementation so smooth and complete that Nexus issued only a single change order during the entire project. Now, Nexus can scale growth without bottlenecks.