Moving time?

How to track customers when they switch address

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Losing contact with customers when they move house? You’re not alone. Help is at hand: advanced techology that predicts customer moves so utilities can engage with them early.

As many as 50,000 people move home each week in the UK.

For those selling up and switching postcodes, it’s a stressful time. And that’s without the plethora of suppliers of services to inform about their new address: banks and building societies, government agencies, mobile phone companies, credit card providers, doctors and pharmacies, employers, clubs and societies, subscription services – the list goes on.

In the midst of all the kerfuffle, it’s pretty easy for customers telling energy and water companies what’s going on to slip to the bottom of their list of priorities, and that’s not good news for utilities.

The customer may fail to inform you they’re changing address, making it tricky to calculate their final bill – and less likely that that final bill will be paid on time. Potentially, the supplier risks incurring a bad debt, with all the hassle and cost of having to eventually chase it down. Worse, they may also miss an opportunity to become the supplier of choice at the new

property. Not only can a lack of knowledge of a house move be expensive: it can also lose you the customer altogether.

But what if it were possible to forecast when a house move was taking place, engaging with the homeowner ahead of time to avoid these undesirable outcomes?

Now it is. That’s thanks to outsourcing specialist Capita and its Digital Mover platform, which analyses data to predict house moves. By encouraging customers to report the move early, Capita’s technology enables an increase in customer engagement and retention, improved cashflow for the utility, and a reduction in chasing bad debt.

For that stressed-out customer, there’s the additional benefit of being presented with a quick and easy change of address process.