Validating customer eligibility for social tariffs generates new revenue for water providers

Sagacity and Synectics Solutions are partnered to help utility providers to better know their customers. By leveraging data, providers can address tariff fraud, identify unknown occupiers and support vulnerable customers. 

Enter your details below to read more about how we helped a utilities provider identify a £1.2m revenue opportunity.

Submit your details to access the full content

Thank you for entering your details. Your content is available to read below.

Sagacity and Synectics Solutions are partnered to help utility providers to better know their customers. By leveraging data, providers can address tariff fraud, identify unknown occupiers and support vulnerable customers.

Client Situation

Our large water client offers social tariffs to support their vulnerable customers.

The client needed to verify that the right people were getting the right financial assistance in their customer base. This includes their existing customers on a social tariff and whether they continued to be eligible to receive it.

The client could not perform the validation themselves as they did not have access to the relevant third-party data or possess the correct tools or analytics expertise to join the dots between the multiple specialist data sources to deliver these insights.

How Did We Help?

Utilising proven data analytics expertise, Sagacity processed over 30k records against third party reference data to flag those customers receiving government support. This entailed leveraging Synectics Solutions’ access to the Cabinet Office’s National Fraud Initiative (NFI) data, which provides a wider view of bill payers’ circumstances with insights into data such as Council Tax payments and benefits like Pension Credits and State Benefits.

Utilising the Cabinet Office datasets and its many data points linked to financial support, we could establish who the bill payers are and what support they receive to determine if they were correctly eligible for their specific tariff.

We could then segment our findings into three groups:

  • 56% of customers were confirmed to be on the correct social tariffs based on their circumstances
  • 36% of customers were receiving a social tariff, but their circumstances showed that they were not eligible for it
  •  8% of customers were highlighted as having data quality issues which were flagged for the customer record to be reviewed and updated

Outcomes & Business Benefits

£1.2m new annual revenue opportunity

The client used our data analytics to flag those customers that were identified as not receiving government support to initiate the customer contact strategy and update the billing system.

A phased customer communications approach was used to minimise the impact on operational teams and enable a positive customer experience.

This activity improved billing accuracy, increased annualised revenue and demonstrated support of vulnerable customers to Ofwat.

Time to connect