335,000 companies are registered each and every year. 231,000 cease to trade in the same year, ZERO of which are required to inform YOU – their water supplier. This leaves you with a substantial problem.
How substantial?
The number of void properties across the water industry ranges from c. 1.5% to 16% of connected properties
In the UK there are c. 800k properties classified as voids/vacant.
Void properties cost the water industry in excess of £300m annually.
(source: MOSL)
Yes, businesses come and go, but that doesn’t mean you as their water supplier should be footing the bill for unaccounted for water. OccuTrace’s Vacants Management service ensures you receive what you’re due. As an additional benefit, you will know in advance whether the occupier is willing to co-operate or if they could be a potential risk. In certain cases, customers can refuse to provide information which can cause issues for the water supplier trying to build a relationship. In this instance, you’ll be notified that there’s a potential risk due to the customer being evasive. In a good case scenario, you can start your relationship with the brand-new customer on a positive note.
Here are 4 key benefits of an excellent Vacants Management:
Accurate Billing
Get accurate occupancy data with OccuTrace. Estimated billing is a problem for everyone – the supplier and the customer. This leaves customers with questions, many of whom may contact customer services to find out why their bill may be higher than anticipated. This creates an administrative backlog and often refunds from erroneous customer bills. This increased ‘cost to serve’ creates unnecessary, and expensive, issues.
Better Customer Service
Having accurate occupancy data helps you to keep on top of your relationships with the customer. Accurate billing ensures that you avoid sending your new customer a ‘back bill’, something that immediately sets you off on the wrong foot (queue an angry phone call to your support people, and the increased likelihood of them leaving you for a competitor). Accurate data is a ‘win-win’ for both water suppliers and property occupiers.
Save Money and Resources
When wholesale market settlement is inaccurate you run the risk of wasting both time and resources going back and forth in an attempt to find a resolution that just doesn’t exist. There is also the substantial cost of training your staff in the specialised field of tackling large numbers of vacant properties. In contrast, OccuTrace personnel are trained to fulfil their roles as full-time professionals with years of vacancy management experience
We perform remote trace work, combining desk research with phone calls, and field visits where necessary allowing for both parties to test, learn and refine activities in a controlled fashion, allowing for a higher accuracy rate – saving you money at every step of the process.
Increase Your Revenue
Accurate occupancy data allows you to track who occupies a property and for how long meaning you are billing the right client the right amount every time.
OccuTrace believes in transparency and doing what we say we will. It is this belief that drives our ‘No Success, No Pay’ approach. Using this model is logical in an industry that is beset with failed visits and poor data, and the results speak for themselves, with our team reporting definitive answers as to whether properties were occupied, vacant, or demolished in 91.58% of this client’s case.
We supply evidence packs for desktop tracing with extensive notes of who was called and how we got to our conclusion/outcome. For our field visits, we record photos of the address on our own system and once our quality assurance team have checked the data sent by the field agent. We release it to the client who can access this through their own personal log-ins.
Download your vacants management case study and book a FREE demo to see how we could help you.