NWC to Improve Billing System

The National Water Commission (NWC) is in the process of rolling out a new US$7 million Customer Information System (CIS) to provide improved service to its two million costumers, islandwide.
The new Customer Information System (CIS) will enable the NWC to provide significantly more information to customers, and more timely dispatch of bills. It will also reduce the time between meter reading, verification and bill dispatch.
Corporate Public Relations Manager at the NWC, Charles Buchanan, said that the NWC bill will also be redesigned to be more customer friendly.
“In a number of ways, the new CIS is expected to make the work of our customer service officers and front office personnel far easier, and make the experiences of customers of the National Water Commission far more seamless and less fraught with questions and difficulties,” he explained.
He said that when completed, the project will advance the NWC’s technical applications, make life better for the staff and customers.
Mr. Buchanan was speaking at a public sector customer service conference and workshop held today (March 11) at the Terra Nova Hotel by the Public Sector Modernization Division of the Cabinet Office.
Essential elements of the roll-out have already been completed, a major one being the data cleansing sub-project.
Mr. Buchanan said this involved islandwide checks of water sources and pipes to verify that they correspond with the particulars on the NWC system. This was complemented by Geographic Information System (GIS) and GPS programming, which provided mapping of all NWC infrastructures across the country.
“So we have been working the data cleansing and the geographic information systems development together, to form a critical part of the customer information system. We are now in the process of transferring all the data collected from the data cleansing sub-project to be fully utilized under the new customer information system development,” Mr. Buchanan said.
He noted that it is expected that the new information system will pay for itself and that the benefits derived by customers will be value for money. He added that the system should ensure that challenges encountered daily with customer complaints are resolved in a speedier manner.
“We expect that a person who calls the NWC with regards to a water supply issue, so soon as they give us some information on their location, or their account number, we would be able to pull up, at the customer service desk or at the call centre desk, an entire file on that customer,” he stated.
The project, which began in January 2008, is expected to be rolled out to customers come August, 2009.