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Coliban Water transforms to meet community needs now and in the future

Find out how the utility provider has increased efficiency and engagement using Salesforce.

Time to read: 8 minutes

About the Company

Coliban Water delivers water and wastewater services to communities across North-Central Victoria. The utility provider’s vision is Healthy Water, Healthy People, and it is committed to meeting community needs now and in the future.

The Challenge

Replace end-of-life systems and keep pace with community needs.

Coliban Water’s previous CRM and billing solutions had aged and were reaching the end of life. At the same time, Coliban Water’s customers’ needs and expectations were changing. Coliban Water needed to innovate faster to keep pace, which meant removing complexity from its technology stack.

The utility provider also wanted to transform from the inside out and provide its team with apps and data to deliver better, smarter, and more connected customer experiences.

How Salesforce Helps

Salesforce provides a comprehensive platform to transform Coliban Water’s operations.

Coliban Water has replaced ageing and disconnected systems with Salesforce, which powers apps for sales, service, and marketing. It also allows for a seamless flow of data to and from Coliban Water’s new billing system, Aptumo from the AppExchange.

The connection between Salesforce and Aptumo has increased billing efficiency, reducing the time between reading customers’ meters and sending bills from five days to just one.

Usage data is collected digitally from smart meters and manually using Field Service, which also streamlines workflow for meter inspections. MuleSoft facilitates integration between Salesforce and Coliban Water’s telemetry system to centralise all the data for billing.

The combined use of Salesforce and Aptumo has also enabled email billing and SMS engagement. Sent via Marketing Cloud, emails and SMS are tailored to include timely, relevant messages. For example, bills can include messaging to invite customers experiencing hardship to contact the Customer Care team.

The team uses Service Cloud to manage hardship claims and other cases. Custom objects streamline workflow, while increased visibility and case tracking help the utility provider identify customers who need its assistance the most.

Process automation, along with a flexible and extensible platform, has simplified the user experience for employees. It has also increased overall control of multiple business processes and delivered time savings, which can be directed to improving customer outcomes.

For example, time saved from the bulk loading of payments, credits, and tariff charges allowed Coliban Water to facilitate the application of 2022 flood relief payments in two days as opposed to the weeks it would have taken in the past. Processes like monthly accruals can also be done in a fraction of the time it took previously.

In addition to these benefits, Coliban Water expects to deflect up to 50% of calls through additional automation, self-service, and AI decision support to be delivered as part of its roadmap for the next three years.

Data and AI underpin continued service innovation.

Coliban Water has deployed Data Cloud to unify and enrich customer data with inputs like telemetry and geographic information system (GIS) data. Connecting this information with CRM, billing, cases and other data, Data Cloud will enable the utility to take advantage of Einstein features like Next Best Action out of the box.

Data Cloud will also help Coliban Water surface insights from its data such as patterns of abnormal use, proactively identifying issues like leaks.

In the future, this will trigger the automatic creation of a case within Service Cloud and a notification to customers sent via their channel of choice. Then, when the customer calls in, Service Cloud Voice will assist the Customer Support team to immediately see who the customer is and identify the issue they are calling about.

Data Cloud will also help Coliban Water effectively communicate with customers impacted by service outages and natural disasters like floods. In the past, identifying which customers may have been impacted by a situation and sending out communication was a time-consuming process. With Data Cloud, Coliban Water will be able to segment audiences faster and more precisely to get messages out more quickly.

“Customer expectations are changing and we need to take a more integrated approach in how we serve them. Salesforce supports us on this journey by allowing us to create a universal view of our customers and increasing visibility of our network."

Lauren McLean

Executive General Manager Customer and Stakeholder Experience
Coliban Water

Salesforce apps and partners set Coliban Water up for success.

Coliban Water partnered with Global System Integrator (SI) Capgemini and Echo Managed Services on the initial implementation. Since then, Coliban Water has worked with Salesforce Professional Services and the wider partner ecosystem to maximise the value of its implementation and realise a number of new use cases. These include automated leak detection using Data Cloud.

Coliban Water has also turned to the AppExchange to solve various challenges. The utility uses Own for data backup and recovery, Marketing Cloud Connect Toolbox to provide service reps visibility of marketing engagement, and Copado to build, test, and deploy apps.

Copado’s DevOps platform ensures deployments run smoothly with little downtime and has helped increase application quality. Moreover, Coliban Water can now release new functionality up to six times faster than before, improving its responsiveness and enabling it to deliver on staged improvements.

The Salesforce Difference

Salesforce helps Coliban Water unlock data from different systems and put it to work across its business to meet customers’ needs, now and in the future.