Portsmouth Water case study | Kraken

Making universal smart meters and self-service a reality

Portsmouth Water provides water supply and distribution services in the UK City of Portsmouth and parts of East Hampshire and West Sussex.

Aerial view of a coastal city featuring the Spinnaker Tower, a harbor with boats, and buildings along the waterfront.

Project Highlights

More than 325,000 accounts migrated in 11 months (the fastest migration in UK water to date)
Adoption of self-service doubled in <12 months
Portsmouth Water have since claimed the number 1 spot in the Customer Measure of Experience (C-MeX, Q1 FY25-26)

Pipe discharging purple liquid into water.

A smarter water system

Since making the switch to Kraken, Portsmouth Water has begun its universal smart meter rollout to 325,000 customers. This underpins the company’s long-term demand management strategy in a water-stressed area.

Kraken is the foundation of our plan to deliver universal smart metering. The idea of having smart meters fitted is to be able to provide information to customers, to help them realize how much water they’re using and whether they could improve that."

Bob Taylor, CEO, Portsmouth Water

Enabling digital self-service for customers

With Kraken, Portsmouth Water co-developed a customer portal that enabled a rich self-service experience online for the first time. Customers can view their account information, download their bills, make one-time payments, submit meter readings, change personal details, and register for additional support services. To date, online customer accounts have increased to 75k users, and are growing by 1,000–2,000 users a week.

A person in a purple sweater holds a shower head spraying purple lines and talks on a smartphone.

An adult and child with dark skin happily brush their teeth together at a bathroom sink.

Delivering stellar customer service

Portsmouth Water transformed their operations by consolidating data and processes across dozens of systems into Kraken’s universal agent model. Teams can now handle all customer needs from end-to-end, eliminating handoffs and improving ownership.

To strengthen local expertise, teams were organized regionally, fostering deeper knowledge of specific areas. Through this transformation, Portsmouth Water aims to further enhance its already stellar track record of customer service

30%

time saved per customer service request

50%

time saved on annual billing

80%

fewer reports needed for more efficient operations

I’ve done two billing system transformations in my career prior to this recent implementation with Kraken and they were very different. Kraken worked really hard. They were as committed as our team were to making sure that the goals of the project were achieved."