South East Water has completed the first phase of a customer service programme, which upgrades email systems, managing a surge in volume and routed emails to appropriate agents.

The system, from software supplier Eptica, will manage the increase in email traffic spurred after South East Water advertised a customer service email address in 2006 which boosted in-bound email traffic from 80 enquiries per week to 80 per day.

Emails are now dealt with faster and more efficiently and are embedded with unique customer reference numbers for tracking, while managers can see average response times and individual performance statistics.

The implementation helped the company to accommodate increases in volume and respond to regulatory requirements, said Dr Howard Handley, head of customer services at South East Water.

“Our previous system for managing email only allowed one employee to log in at any one time," he said.

"As we were only processing about 80 to 100 in-bound email enquiries each week, this was suitable for our needs at that time. When this figure suddenly escalated it became immediately clear that the system would not be able to cope. It would also be impossible for us to sustain our Ofwat response targets.”