Welsh Water

Welsh Water (Dwr Cymru) supplies water to over three million business and residential customers. Digital self-service is central to that model. The more customers can do for themselves online, the less Welsh Water spends on manual processing and call handling.

A legacy platform weighed down by years of accumulated technical debt offered limited self-service capability, and a confused information architecture meant customers defaulted to the call centre for routine tasks like paying bills, submitting meter readings and setting up direct debits. Customer portal adoption was low and the cost to serve remained high.

With nearly 60% of Welsh Water's customers in the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations, digital adoption couldn't be assumed. Over a partnershiUNRVLD and Welsh Water have focused on redesigning every journey so that the easiest option is also the digital one.

UNRVLD has supported Welsh Water’s digital journey for over ten years, embedding product and design capability within the client team and delivering through continuous improvement. The approach has been customer-centric to promote digital adoption; identify the highest-friction customer journeys, redesign them around user research, automate wherever possible and release in sprints. Crucially, the testing is done with real customers before each deployment.

Welsh Waters’ self-serve portal, the My Account portal now lets customers manage direct debits, submit meter readings, move house, and handle billings through a single login. Meter reading submissions moved from a manual, heavy process to an online process that takes minutes. Payment journeys were rebuilt to reduce the dropout rates that were pushing people to contact the call centre.

Behind the portal, the Sitecore DXP platform integrates with Welsh Water’s billing, debt recovery and operations systems through a Mulesoft middleware layer, giving the organisation a single view of each customer relationship with the company.

Routine transactions that once required a phone call, such as paying bills, submitting meter readings, setting up direct debits, moving house are now run through a single self-service portal that customers actively choose over traditional channels.

Operational teams that spent their days processing manual requests have been freed to focus on more complex customer needs. Paper-based processes that generated errors and cost have been replaced by automated digital workflows across the majority of customer services and achieving millions saved in paper and hours of time.

Vulnerable customers are no longer invisible until they fall into debt. The platform identifies households at risk of financial hardship through billing data and routes them to support proactively - reaching tens of thousands of people who might otherwise have gone without help.

The model has delivered measurable cost to serve reduction across successive investment cycles, with the savings reinvested back into Welsh Water's infrastructure and communities.

Welsh Water’s current AMP8 investment cycle (2025-2030) sets ambitious targets for digital channel shift – moving more customers onto self-service and reducing reliance on traditional contact channels. UNRVLD is working with Welsh Water on this programme, with eBilling on-site search improvements as the current major project.