Customer satisfaction initiatives
Over the year we’ve introduced initiatives to support our aim of increasing customer satisfaction. In our billing area, these include changing our ’move in - move out’ process, simplifying our approach for call agents and allowing customers to complete the process in one call, rather than two. Customers can now apply for a free meter option over the telephone or web, rather than completing a form and posting it to us. Our bills have been redesigned, to take into account customer feedback. We’ve also focused on increasing the level of permanent employees in the call centre, with a new approach to induction training and targeted training to increase both the empathy and knowledge of our employees.
In our water and wastewater operations, a major area of improvement has been our new work scheduling and customer contact system, known as workforce management. We have also focused on keeping customers informed with proactive updates. Targeted training has been given to our call agents in wastewater to help them understand the end-to-end process.
Earlier this year, we brought the customer service team responsible for handling all written correspondence with water customers and debt collection back in house. It had previously been outsourced to an external service provider. This brings all our UK customer service organisation under a single management team, making the process of delivering customer services much more streamlined.
Projects scheduled for the year ahead include continued training of our customer-facing employees to ensure our customers have confidence in our understanding of their issue and that it will be resolved. End-to-end process reviews are a key priority, targeting reducing the time taken to resolve a query, and improving the overall customer experience.
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