Service requests made faster

Welsh Water already operated at full civic scale: storms, bursts on large mains, and heavy capital work were normal operating noise for a supplier serving around three million people across most of Wales and adjoining areas. Contact centres carried that load alongside everyday customer work.

Most contact into a water company is still billing and accounts. That deserves a straight answer. Leaks and supply hits show up less often in the totals, but they do not feel rare when water is across the pavement or the shower drops to a trickle. Those two reasons were still landing in the same phone queue.

Research on the phone-led path for service requests showed about 20 minutes average wait before a caller could finish during busy periods. Tolerable for a meter question; a poor match when water is leaving the pipe.

The opportunity was to move repeat, high-stakes reporting (such as reporting a leak) onto structured digital intake that fed automation and dispatch without losing nuance.

I ran a design sprint with product, operations, and content to agree what to build first: guided flows that walk someone through reporting a leak or another service request, capturing location, severity, anything unsafe on site, and photos when useful, with plain-language next steps on screen.

Behind the scenes the target was rules-based routing and RPA into the systems dispatch already trusted, so the first payload matched how trunk repair, sewer inspection, and reinstatement were sequenced, not a generic CRM shape agents had to rewrite.

We stopped at MVPs on purpose: enough to prototype and user-test, without treating one workshop as a production launch. Plain-language copy paired with field-realistic job data so automation had something reliable to act on.

The aim was practical: less ambiguity when a request arrives, fewer callbacks to fill gaps, and dispatch seeing what crews need on the first screen. Agents kept doing what only people should do; automation took predictable steps that had been burning minutes and mis-keys.

Satisfaction scores and capital programmes shift with regulation and weather. The durable bet was narrower: when intake is structured, people spend less time on hold for emergencies that should never have waited behind billing volume, and the organisation keeps clear signal through normal civic disruption: storms, bursts, and peak call periods alike.