As an essential service which homes and businesses can’t live without, customer service is essential in the water sector. Yet, the services delivered by water companies are taken for granted by most of us and our interactions with water companies tend to be few and far between.
Indeed, if asked to provide our opinion on our water company it’s likely that many of us might opt for the Don’t Know option or gravitate towards the middle of the scale if presented with the classic Net Promoter Score rating question. Feelings of indifference are common when it comes to water and many of us don’t have a full appreciation of the full scope of services provided by and supported by our water company.
However, although levels of customer engagement tend to be low, given the critical nature of the services they provide, water companies can’t afford to ignore customer experience. In England and Wales the regulator, Ofwat, measures household customer’s levels of satisfaction using C-MeX (Customer Measure of Experience). The results of the surveys which feed into this measure are taken very seriously by all of the water companies, not least because those companies which perform above average are rewarded financially while those performing below par are penalised.
During the last year we’ve been delighted to be working with Anglian Water to help them to tackle the issues of low customer engagement with the sector and to identify the best ways for them to boost levels of customer satisfaction.Recognising how many people take the water that comes through their tap for granted, Anglian Water have an ambition to change how people think and feel about their brand, moving from a position where people have little or no interest to one where the organisation and its work feels more relevant to them and their communities. The advertisement below is an example of how they are seeking to do this with the key message that “Water is our business, but there is so much more we do for the people, communities and environment we look after.”
During the last year we’ve helped Anglian Water to gain valuable insights from a range of data sources available to them including their quarterly brand and communications tracking and the data available from the Ofwat surveys which drive the all-important C-MeX score.
Our work is supporting Anglian Water by making the most of the data collected from these existing surveys, helping them to move from a position of simply tracking satisfaction and communication metrics to one where they have a clearer understanding of the actions needed to become more meaningful to and appreciated by customers.
If you’d like to find out more about our work in utilities, brand and communications or customer experience research please get in touch.