We’re always striving to improve the services we deliver to customers and increase their levels of satisfaction.
So it’s positive that in our water business, overall domestic customer satisfaction has increased again, with a rating of 76% in 2008/09, up from 73% in 2006/07.
Over the year we’ve introduced a number of initiatives to support increasing satisfaction levels, including our new work scheduling and customer contact system, workforce management, as well as improved billing, more and simpler ways for customers to order services and targeted training for our customer contact employees.
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. Overall we were placed 14th out of the top 50 call centres in the UK across all industry sectors.
The number of customer complaints we received increased last year, with 43,506 overall in 2008/09 (from 31,920 in 2007/08). This is a disappointing performance, in light of improved customer satisfaction with their general experience of our service and our efforts to improve this. We believe that the further embedding of new customer systems and processes will help to reduce complaints.
Customers benefited from a reduction in the number of properties suffering from a low pressure water supply. These dropped from 509 to 272 over the year. We cut the proportion of households suffering unplanned water supply interruptions by a half in 2008/09 to 0.55% from 1.1% in 2007/08.
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.
Customer training has improved the 'soft' skills of our customer-facing employees. The objective has been to develop and implement a standard approach to the way in which we manage the front end customer experience and to deliver a 'right first time' service.
We’ve also improved in key service delivery areas, such as gas escapes and electricity supply interruptions. While we met our target for minutes lost by electricity customers, our performance was slightly lower than last year, due to a different combination of fault types from the previous year.
In the electricity network contract, we have operated a ‘Power in an Hour’ campaign to focus our people on our key performance measures. Improvements have been made to our telephony system to help provide customers with better information when there’s a fault.