Outsourced customer contact specialist, Echo Managed Services, has won a successful retender with Northern Ireland Water, extending its metering and billing contract for another two years.

The contract will see Echo undertake field and office based activities to ensure appropriate and correct billing for the 1.8 million people within Northern Ireland Water’s remit – a service Echo has delivered since 2016 following a competitive procurement process.

Echo’s office team will continue to undertake analysis using Echo’s proprietary software systems to highlight billing inaccuracies and identify those meters requiring further investigation and action.

Its field teams are strategically stationed across six Northern Ireland Water depots. Their key role is to visit customer premises to investigate individual cases, prioritising first time resolution and minimising repeat visits.

The contract builds on an existing long term relationship between the two companies - Echo has delivered end-to-end customer contact management, billing processes and revenue management for Northern Ireland Water since 2006.

The metering and billing partnership has already generated some impressive results. Since September 2016 alone, Echo’s team has completed over 24,000 field visits, with more than 34,000 cases closed and 2,511 accounts billed or back-billed. Echo has also designed and delivered a number of improvement initiatives during the contract, such as new dashboards, quality assurance methodology and e-learning.

Gary Curran, head of metering and billing at Northern Ireland Water, said:

“We’ve enjoyed a productive and valuable partnership with Echo over the past 12 years and have been thoroughly impressed with the way the team has executed the more recent metering and billing contract. Importantly, they operate with a customer-centric mindset that has had some great feedback from our stakeholders.”