Yorkshire Water use Names & Numbers to find customer contact name and address details faster – with as many phone numbers as possible.

A clean, fresh glass of water, flushing the toilet, watering the plants – it’s as easy as turning on the tap! We don’t need to think of the huge infrastructure, investment and planning that brings a consistent supply to the door. But water customers do have questions, want to report incidents and discuss their account. Yorkshire Water needs to make this customer contact easy both for the 1.7 million households they serve, and their own staff. Most of this work is handled by Loop, a dedicated customer services centre.

Both Loop and Yorkshire Water used a third party system to look up residential and commercial contact details. Available to all 4,000 employees, most of the use is by the customer services centre. The system was being reviewed and the procurement team contacted AFD Software to invite them to participate in a trial for the selection of a directory service.

Customer Relationship Manager at Loop, Nigel Fieldhouse said: “Through the process we were hoping to find a faster way of retrieving contact details, and a more comprehensive set of commercial and residential data – with as many phone numbers as possible.“

Nigel continued “After the demonstrations and presentations, we conducted detailed testing of data quality and coverage. We carefully compared the results from each of the products we were assessing. Names & Numbers from AFD Software came out ahead with the results being both more complete and more up-to-date.”

Vimla Mistry, award-winning credit collections manager was keen to look closely at how users would interact with the product: “Lack of clarity in the interface and ‘information overload’ can distract users and waste time. Of course the objective is the opposite of this. We want people to find what they need – more quickly.”

Nigel added “AFD Software assigned two specialists to look at our working environment and processes and to understand exactly what our staff were doing now and how this could be made more efficient. They showed us all that Names & Numbers could offer – and how this fitted to our precise requirements.“

Vimla continued “We often need to find a particular type of organisation or a specific person within a certain radial distance from an address. AFD proposed a clean, yet complete interface which gave staff all they needed – without ‘noise’ or distraction.”

Namita Mistry ran the procurement process: “A variety of implementation options were available from AFD and they liaised closely with the Yorkshire Water IT Team. It was decided to opt for a customised browser interface, entirely hosted, updated and maintained by AFD. This meant we did not need to use valuable internal IT resources for development, testing, deployment, maintenance and hardware resources – AFD do all the work.”

Namita continued “We had a clear time-line for implementation and the customised interface was delivered on-time, met the specification and satisfied the security requirements of our IT team. AFD Names & Numbers is now in use across the whole organisation as part of a long term agreement.“

Nigel summarised the experience of users “The users cannot get over how fast Names & Numbers is. The information is up-to-date and fresh. We are getting a lot of results we were not able to get previously. Names & Numbers is just better than any product we have previously used. The interface has a unique ‘Fast Find’ system where our users type in the search information into a single field and it works out and returns what you’re looking for. Our searches are simply faster to make and more likely to be successful.”

Yorkshire Water also utilises AFD Postcode products on its web site and internally to help deliver even better customer service and keep down internal costs.

Vimla concludes “We would definitely recommend Names & Numbers to anyone looking for a comprehensive reference to UK names and addresses.”