Severn Trent Africa opts for arivia.kom in developing Pikitup`s CRM blueprint

Severn Trent Africa (STA) in association with its local project partners, which includes leading South African IT company, arivia.kom, was awarded a multiple stage contract in May 2002 to assist Pikitup in developing its customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

The delivery of customer service excellence is one of Pikitup`s key strategic thrusts going forward and part of the ongoing commercial transformation of Pikitup Johannesburg as a newly established solid waste utility.

Pikitup serves approximately 2.8 million domestic customers, housed in 787 000 dwellings in Gauteng, generating about 1.4 million tons of waste per annum. The geographic coverage amounts to some 1 625km2 .

Pikitup was registered as a separate private company on 1 January 2001. This required the merging of the waste management operations of five metropolitan sub-structures together with Edenvale and Midrand. These separate business entities had to be integrated into a single business and aligned with the service delivery and commercial targets set by the City of Johannesburg, which retains a 100% shareholding in Pikitup.

Part of this transformation has been the establishment and optimisation of a dedicated customer relations centre (CRC) that will, in time, handle all the city`s domestic solid waste customer contacts as well as all commercial customers that form part of Pikitup`s client base. Severn Trent has opted for arivia.kom, a leading South African IT company, to assist it with the assessment of both the technology and business processes currently employed by Pikitup in dealing with its customers.

Roelf de Beer, general manager of marketing at Pikitup, notes that competing effectively with other private sector waste management companies makes excellent customer service a business imperative. He adds: "When Joburg Connect was established, Pikitup, like all the other utilities, agencies and corporate entities established by the City of Johannesburg, were linked into a central [Joburg Connect] electronic call centre, which fields all telephonic customer contacts and then redirects the relevant Pikitup enquiries to the Pikitup call centre based at our Braamfontein head office. However, only a very small percentage of calls, about 10%, come through to us via Joburg Connect.

"Our goal is to upgrade the call centre to a customer relations centre that will be equipped to handle all customer contacts, thereby allowing depot staff to focus on improving service delivery and customer contact closure, ie improved turnaround times. The centre will also allow us to accurately measure our performance and service delivery standards."

In order to achieve this objective, Pikitup recognised the need to procure the services of consultants that had the requisite skills, knowledge and experience in managing and delivering projects of this nature and complexity. Pikitup entered into an open tender procurement process for this project. Tenders were issued in January 2002, and Severn Trent Africa and its local partners were awarded the contract to assist Pikitup with the establishment of a CRC.

Severn Trent Africa is the South African-based advisory arm of Severn Trent Water International, a Severn Trent plc group company.

Says Deon Nel, Business Development manager for Severn Trent Africa: "We offer an integrated and holistic approach when dealing with projects of this nature. Clearly the wealth of practical knowledge that exists within the group can literally be applied to all facets of this project. We have identified a number of other areas within Pikitup that are also critical in achieving the goal of customer service excellence.

"Joburg Connect remains the first port of call for customer contact. It is expected that the response time for incoming calls will also improve dramatically, and that Pikitup will be able to achieve a 95% resolution rate of customer contacts at first point of contact in the foreseeable future.

"The challenge is how to increase the organisation`s capability to handle calls/customer contacts which may amount to as many as 10 000 a month. Clearly a sound organisation, with appropriate business processes and a well defined IT enabling environment will constitute the critical success factors for Pikitup in meeting its customer service excellence objective. Arivia.kom has been instrumental in mapping and reviewing the core customer contact processes, and establishing how the information is managed. "

Nem Stewart, the business unit manager from the Focused Business Solutions division of arivia.kom, adds: "We facilitated the development of the business processes with Pikitup`s Business Process Review team. Analysis techniques were utilised which included problem solving and solution selection matrices, impact analysis and flow diagrams."

The next stage will be to evaluate the IT environment from a software and hardware perspective, ie to find the most effective and efficient match in terms of IT infrastructure that will enable the re-engineered business processes.