South East Water’s Priority Plumbing achieves improved booking response times and drives cost-savings with Riyo POC

Riyo, a JCurve Solutions (ASX: JCS) company, has been successful in securing a proof of concept with South East Water’s Priority Plumbing.

South East Water is a Victorian government utility provider that works for every part of the community, supplying water, wastewater and recycled water services to more than 1.7 million people in Melbourne’s south-east region.

Priority Plumbing is the South East Waters trusted plumbing partner that guarantees top service 24/7 with a comprehensive range of plumbing services at competitive rates.

In March 2019, Priority Plumbing identified the need for a robust service management solution to support its expanding requirements and coordination of an increasing number of jobs plus future growth goals. Manual processes were creating bottlenecks within the company’s services, and operational improvements were needed.

Priority Plumbing aimed to optimise the performance of the following areas:

• Improve the efficiency and visibility across the end-to-end service delivery process
• Improve the quality of services delivered to its customers
• Move towards a customer-centric model to deliver an enhanced, end-to-end customer experience
• Capture the customer experience their perceptions and overall satisfaction

To realise these improvements, Priority Plumbing began with a full review of its current processes with a focus on modernising the entire service management process. Wayne McGlone, Group Manager together with Nerida Casey, Senior Business Process Analyst, knew that the task ahead would need the business to work together to achieve a successful outcome. They started out with a shared goal of bringing together the right people, processes and platform to drive efficiency for the workforce, community and welfare of Priority Plumbing. There were several challenges that the project team needed to solve, namely:

• A lack of visibility and metrics over service delivery
• A paper-based, manual-repetitive services process
• Lots of duplication in the process that was open to human error
• Little feedback and visibility of the customer experience
• A lack of real-time data for management to make informed decisions

After reviewing a number of systems, Priority Plumbing selected to progress a Proof of Concept (POC) with JCurve Solutions’ Riyo software. The flexibility, agility and modern capability of the Riyo solution, coupled with their experience with integration into their financial management system, were important factors in the selection process.

The initial 8-week Riyo POC has proven the desired business outcomes can be achieved with results of faster response times, increased time 

savings, increased visibility over services (metrics and feedback) and a more streamlined and optimised operation.

The Riyo system was selected to drive a seamless service that would improve operational efficiency and the customer experience. Starting from the very outset with bookings, Riyo will allow the customer to book through additional channels other than calling or emailing, with web-widgets being set up across Priority Plumbing’s social media pages and website.

Riyo also allows a link to be sent to contacts within the customer base where they can make bookings quickly and easily. Automated, real-time communication allows for full visibility over the service but also takes a huge burden off the back-office team by removing the need to chase up plumbers for updates into the job progress.

Once a service is completed the ability to take payment, distribute payment and write back the transaction into the financial system will also significantly reduce the manual-processing burden for the admin staff.

Wayne has credited much of the success of the project to effective planning, change management and particularly to the Riyo team’s responsiveness and dedication to the project. “We look forward to the on-going success of this partnership and to continue delivering a high standard of service and keeping our customers smiling”.

Riyo has been successful in extending the proof of concept further to embed the deployment of this project further within the Priority Plumbing service ecosystem.