Customers can access real-time information with our new location feature

Customers can now avail of quick access to relevant information on their water supply, based on where they live, thanks to the rollout of a newly designed Uisce Éireann website. The changes will allow people in every village and town to immediately see what works and projects are ongoing in their locality by setting their location at water.ie.

This is already proving helpful for customers experiencing issues such as water outages. A quick look at the Uisce Éireann website immediately tells them what the issue is, the areas affected and when it will be rectified. With over 900,000 users on the site ever year, this revamp will ensure water.ie continues to provide an essential public service.

Designed to work on your mobile phone or any other device, the state of the art website lets you set your location with updates and news relevant to your locality served upfront on the homepage. It also enables Uisce Éireann to deliver important public health messages and reassurance to the public that we are working every day to provide a clean and safe supply of drinking water for our customers while returning wastewater safely to the environment.

Head of Customer Operations with Uisce Éireann, Yvonne Harris explains how this dynamic, new-look website will better serve customers: "We have upgraded our website so it is more user-friendly. We talked to our customers, we listened to their feedback and made changes to better improve the user experience for all.

"We are now keeping our customers informed, in real time, about any issues that may be impacting their water supply as well as updates on significant projects, leakage works and water quality.

"This new-look version of water.ie takes the effort out of the search for information by giving customers important, relevant, location-based information on the homepage. With one click to set your location or the option to choose a locality, visitors to the site can immediately view key information for their chosen geographical area.

"Now, instead of Donegal residents seeing news for Dublin, or Cork residents seeing information on outages in Offaly, they see local news, supply updates, and information on water quality and projects. And it's one click to turn it off and return to a national view. In addition, a mobile-first design caters to the vast majority of visitors who use mobiles to access water.ie."

Yvonne continued: "From research and data analysis, Uisce Éireann's Communications and Customer teams have a better understanding of what our customers want. The previous site structure meant customers had to undertake separate journeys to check for an outage or find relevant information on water quality or local news stories, making it a laborious process. The team wanted to give our customers the option to get a full picture of what was happening in their locality, all in one place."

Since its launch in 2013, water.ie has grown and evolved into a key communication channel for Uisce Éireann. Today it is a nationally prominent large-scale, high-traffic, dynamic website visited by over 900,000 users annually. These visitors use the website to find information that is important to them across a wide range of topics.

Luke McGuinness, Uisce Éireann's Online Marketing Manager added: "Uisce Éireann's internal stakeholders also seek to use the website to communicate directly with their target audiences, from households to developers. The challenge, with high demand from users and internal stakeholders, is to ensure the content is useful, relevant, up-to-date, and easy to find. Additionally, the website's national prominence means that it must be able to withstand sudden, massive increases in traffic when announcements of major importance occur.

"In tandem with the location-based content, our IT team has delivered an infrastructure upgrade which makes the website more resilient and reliable. This provides a solution for high demand issues as well as laying the ground for future sustained growth. The delivery of these two initiatives enhances the experience for users, making the website more reliable and enabling them to find local, relevant information more easily."

Derek Brady, Creative Director at Dept, the digital agency supporting the new-look website said: "As humans, we respond better to information that is more relevant to us. With Uisce Éireann, we recognised that the customer's needs had to be addressed at a more local level-the right information, in the right place, at the right time."

Uisce Éireann is committed to keeping customers informed across multiple platforms 24/7 and we encourage customers to engage with us through our website, Twitter channels @IWCare and @IrishWater, on Facebook and LinkedIn and through our customer care helpline which is open 24/7 on 1800 278 278.