Scottish Water

The Challenge

Scottish Water is a publicly-owned company and the sole provider of water services in Scotland to five million customers in 2.4 million households. The Scottish Water website is a crucial source of information and up-to-date reports on incidents and services.

Following the severe snow and frost of previous winters, Scottish Water wanted to modernise its website to make it easier and faster for customers to get information about their water supply and how to safeguard their pipes. Another important element was to make the site more accessible for disabled people, with features such as magnification for the visually impaired.

Chris Wallace, Director of Communications, Scottish Water, says, “Eduserv was recommended as one of the best Sitecore developers. Eduserv has a really good reputation in the public sector and very high standards for website accessibility development – a key objective for Scottish Water increasing customer communication.”

The Solution

We provided Scottish Water with a managed service that included a complete re-build of its website using Sitecore and website hosting. Features of the redevelopment include:

• user-focused content and navigation structured around business and domestic customers.
• faster and more mobile friendly pages.
• hosting on our Government Ready Platform - shared virtualised infrastructure in our UK Data Centre.

Website traffic can fluctuate, particularly during cold spells when water pipes burst. Normally the site gets around 1,000 visits a day but this can rise nearly 10-fold during peak periods. Using virtualised hosting makes it easier and more cost-effective to scale server resources to meet demand.

We build websites that are designed to evolve with your organisation and are already working with Scottish Water on the next part of their digital roadmap. This includes adding features for customers to personalise their web experience with geolocation information, online payments and mapping software for use during incidents.

Results

• Delivers a consistent, easy-to-use and improved online customer experience.
• Makes it faster and easier for customers to find critical service information.
• Helps channel-shift traffic away from call centre services to more cost-effective web information.
• More intuitive and user-friendly: Sitecore Content Management System makes it easier for non-technical staff to add and
  update real-time and multimedia-based information.
• New website developed and deployed in just four months, in time for winter. 
• Eduserv’s web hosting reduces IT costs and management overhead.
• Makes site traffic fluctuation easy and cost-effective to manage.