UK Water Company Chooses Talgentra’s Collection System

South West Water has announced that it has chosen Talgentra’s customer revenue management and collection system to manage customers in arrears and collect on unpaid bills.

The use of Talgentra’s Tallyman system will significantly improve South West Water’s (SWW) bottom line in two ways; by collecting revenue that would otherwise have been written off and by reducing the cost of collecting debts.

In a contract valued at around £1 million over five years, Tallyman will be used to manage collections activity for customers who are behind on their payments.  This includes business and residential customers and both unmeasured and measured customers.

South West Water realised that to be at the leading edge of collections and recoveries – an area of its business where it competes with other service providers for payment -  it needed to make significant improvements to its existing operation  by using specialist advice and consultancy combined with a best-of-breed debt recovery and revenue management system.  After a comprehensive selection process, Tallyman was chosen.

Ned Colman, Customer Collections Manager at SWW, said: “We recognised that to maximise our collections and reduce the cost to collect, we needed to segment customers in arrears so that we could abandon the ‘red-letter-fits-all’ approach and treat our customers in a more personalised and sensitive way.  Our aim is to ensure that we take the right recovery action for the right customer at the right time and at the right price. Tallyman enables us to do this and, in our opinion, it is by far the best system on the market for managing, collecting and ultimately reducing customer debt.”

Brian Dewis, CEO of Talgentra, said:  “Many utilities are not adopting a best-practice approach to decrease the level of customer write-offs and continue to rely on IT systems that have evolved over time.  However, specialist collection systems are available today, and the return on investment of deploying these has been proven. In an age when debt is no longer taboo and utilities are under continual pressure from investors to improve performance, they’ll have to think of a pretty good reason for not adopting proven techniques for improving collections rates in 2007."