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Inaccurate data to mar customer-experience in competitive water retail market
The water retail market must clean up its data ahead of market opening to avoid issues with customer switching, a company director has told Utility Week.
SES Business Water sales director Bill Clarke said: “[Customers know] from the energy side how data has caused them so much in the way of problems in processing and switching.”
He said the market has a data accuracy issue, as data is transferred from 25 different suppliers to a single retailer, which must cleanse that data and make sure every site name and address is correct.
“For example, I did a group of hotels and they’re all known by the same name, but trying to find them in the market database [proved difficult].
“In some cases the hotel name was in the address line, some of it wasn’t in there at all, what the customer perceives a site postcode to be and what the water company perceives the site postcode to be were different.”
Clarke warned that with 25 water retailers adding data on 2.4 million water and wastewater supplies in the the Central Market Operating System (CMOS), switching errors are very likely.
He added: “You’ve then got groups that have grown up from different names, some high-street stores are listed by out of date names. Some groups are just known by numerous variants of a similar name, whilst some names have been bastardised to fit into billing system limitations.”
A lot of water companies, too, have neglected to load meter location details into the CMOS because they don’t record it in their billing system. “That needs tidying up,” he insisted.
Clarke’s concerns are echoed by other industry authorities. A utilities data governance expert recently told Utility Week that “transfer errors are a risk – they happened in energy when it opened to competition”.
The source added that new data regulations are due to come into force next year, setting more stringent requirements for security and for customer access to data. They warned “the cost of breaches is high”.
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