Paying your water bill through telephone conversations with 'virtual agents' is set to become the norm in the water sector following the adoption of a new speech recognition service by four of the UK's leading water companies - South East Water, Sutton & East Surrey Water, Bristol Water and Wessex Water.

The new system called PaymentCapture(tm) offers customers a convenient way to pay their water bills 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in line with Ofwat, the industry regulator's, recommendations.

Water companies, like most utility companies, experience a very heavy demand on resources around the time of a billing run. This often has several key impacts including recruitment of expensive temporary staff to ensure regulatory obligations are met, which can impact on customer service. In addition to this, existing staff can be re-allocated from across the business to take inbound calls, leaving other departments low on resources.

Paul Barnes, Director of Fluency Voice Technology the company responsible for developing the speech recognition packages, says; "Each day, collections are lost or delayed because customers cannot find a convenient way to make a payment. Agent-based collection services are typically only available during working hours, while touch-tone applications are perceived as difficult to navigate, unpopular and cause caller frustration. As a result, utilities are suffering the cost of extra administration for bill collection, or bad debts."

Nigel Hammond, of Sutton & East Surrey Water, says: "The new speech recognition system provides an excellent service for people wanting to pay their bills, allowing us to drive collection rates and help meet customer service targets set by Ofwat. The virtual agent is a real voice, operated by advanced software that will give our customers another convenient way to pay.. Paying bills is often a leisure-time activity, so offering a telephone service 24x7 will make it easier for customers to pay their bills anytime, day or night, whilst also increasing collection rates."

Paul Barnes added: "Before PaymentCapture(tm) utilities had to staff call centres generously to keep call queues within regulatory requirements with some callers giving up trying to pay due to the restricted hours of operation."

Fluency's PaymentCapture(tm) is a hosted debit and credit card payment hotline service that helps utilities realise cost savings, increased efficiency and accuracy benefits of modern customer self-service applications. This solution improves customer service and cuts operational costs with minimum upfront investment. It is part of Utilities Hub, a range of speech applications designed specifically for the utilities sector, which has handled over 9 million calls in the UK to date.

This PaymentCapture(tm) speech recognition service has been designed to be 'off-the-shelf' so other water companies can benefit immediately.

The system allows callers to speak their details directly to the system, providing a fast, accurate and secure payment method. The service collects credit and debit card details and obtains real-time bank authorisation (APACS 30) and transaction settlement (APACS 29) where required.

For further information on Fluency: www.fluencyvoice.com

Try PaymentCapture(tm) for yourself by calling: 0870-190-8030

You will need to pretend to be: Reference number: 29330-2 Name: Alex Richmond Postcode: TD1 9JW Credit Card No: 5301 2552 2880 6753 (or use your own) Expiry Date: 02/06

Fluency Voice Technology Ltd
Nigel Jones, The Purple Tangerine, +44-7980-213-122, +44-1233-712-899, nigel@purpletangerine.com