Helping United Utilities drive 70% of its website traffic to self-serve content and tools

Background

United Utilities delivers water and wastewater services to over 7 million people across the North West every day.

For over 16 years, we’ve been their trusted partner—helping shape and support their digital strategy, user experience, implementation, ongoing support, and managed hosting. Together, we have:

• Helped move customers to digital self-service channels, reducing call centre costs
• Enhanced customer experience with practical tools—ranging from water safety campaigns and usage calculators to safe dig applications, share price feeds, and updates on planned works
• Supported diverse stakeholders by developing digital strategies and microsites for different areas of the business
• Ensured customers have reliable access to digital tools, backed by round-the-clock support, maintenance, and managed hosting for their CMS, websites, and portals

Business Drivers

United Utilities set out to deliver personalised, contextually relevant information for their customers.

To achieve this, they moved their main customer website from the OpenText/RedDot CMS to a modern content management and customer experience platform, powered by Optimizely.

They also migrated both the Cumbria and Corporate websites onto this new platform, streamlining content management and making life easier for their editors. Additionally, they ensured their MyAccount portal - originally built outside Optimizely - could also be managed seamlessly through the new system.

Solution

The new United Utilities website is designed to cover customers’ most common needs. Visitors can easily find details on current incidents, planned works updates, and check local water quality. To make navigation effortless, we added a comprehensive FAQ section and a site-wide menu, giving customers quick access to vital information when they need it most.

To help United Utilities stay ahead of growing regulatory demands, we introduced a custom address checker for emergencies. When there’s a water supply issue, this tool can be activated to let customers quickly check if their property is affected.

For a better employee experience, we brought all United Utilities sites together on the Optimizely platform, making it easy to reuse components across pages.

The MyAccount portal now runs on a custom Optimizely build, providing a unified, content-managed navigation shared across the main site and MyAccount. This also unlocks Optimizely’s personalisation features, allowing United Utilities to surface content tailored to each user’s profile and behaviour.

Outcome

The new platform makes it easier and more cost-effective to add features across all United Utilities sites. Customers benefit from a more visually appealing and user-friendly experience.

In the first six months post-launch, non-desktop traffic made up 60% of visits, with mobile accounting for 46% and tablets 13%. Since January 2017, at least 70% of page views have focused on self-serve and task-based areas. Impressively, 5% of all visits result in a bill payment. The site also earned a bronze award in the ‘Service and Support’ category at the Optimizely awards.

Visitors searching for information such as postcode lookups or account number retrieval, now experience a much-improved user journey.

Our partnership with United Utilities is ongoing. Together, we regularly analyse insights and identify new ways to enhance the user experience. One key improvement was boosting the search function. Previously, searches for ‘postcode’ or ‘find my account number’ yielded poor results. Using AI, we enhanced the feature with Azure’s Language Understanding Intelligence Services (LUIS), enabling the website to interpret user intent in real time.

Now, if someone searches their postcode, the site displays live updates about current incidents, planned works, and water quality in their area. The result: reduced frustration and a more helpful, streamlined customer experience.