We provide essential services to millions of people worldwide.
As well as providing water, wastewater and electricity services to people and businesses in the North West, we also use our core utility skills to operate other utilities both in the UK and abroad.
Customers are the heart of everything we do and we are working hard to improve what we do for the people we serve directly in our regulated areas, as well as indirectly through our non regulated contracts.
More of our customers are telling us that they are happy with the service that we provide. Overall domestic customer satisfaction has increased again, with a rating of 76% in 2008/09, up from 73 % in 2006/07 and we’re working hard to improve our systems to make it easier for our customers to contact us and to ensure they receive a high level of service when they do.
For instance, in this current economic climate we are addressing the issue of affordability. We offer a range of payment options and provide additional services for people in financial hardship.
A new charge for non domestic, metered customers, introduced this year, has proved challenging. Site Area Charging calculates the surface water and highways drainage element of a bill, based on the size of the premises. We are listening to feedback from customers and are improving how we communicate and implement this charge.
Getting it right when customers call is crucial. This year we were rated number one for customer service in the UK utility and telecoms sector in the Call Centre Focus Magazine Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service awards. We achieved a score of 86% against an industry average of 82% for the sector in the UK’s biggest ever call centre benchmarking exercise.
In our non-regulated contracts, we’ve also improved customer and client satisfaction in the metering, gas and electricity areas over the past year, working hard with clients and customers to achieve this.
And this year we were selected as preferred bidder for a 27-year contract to provide a municipal solid waste treatment in Derbyshire.