We’re focused on enhancing the services we deliver to our customers. We believe the most meaningful test of this is to survey customers who’ve had reason to contact us and ask them about their satisfaction with the end-to-end service they receive. Overall, we contact around 10,000 customers each year to do this.
Since 2006/07, our measure of satisfaction has used the results of 800 telephone surveys carried out each month with domestic customers. We involve people who have recently contacted us with a query related to their bill, their clean water service or wastewater service to measure satisfaction. Customers are asked a number of questions about how their enquiry was dealt with as well as their overall satisfaction level.
Over the course of 2008/09 overall satisfaction levels were 76%. In 2007/08 overall satisfaction was 73% and 68% in 2006/07. Our target for 2009/10 is 82%.
As well as overall satisfaction, we also track specific parts of the customer contact service and service delivery, such as keeping customers informed and first-time resolution of queries. We also analyse satisfaction by the three functional areas of billing, water and wastewater and in terms of our own customer liaison employees and partners that help us deliver customer services.
This detailed information helps us to pinpoint the processes involved in customer service that need to be improved and has given us an invaluable understanding of what aspects of service are most important to our customers – such as only needing to ring us once and having confidence that action will be taken as a result of the call. We’ve developed this into our Customer Charter, used by all our employees to focus on customer service. Over the year we have introduced a number of initiatives to support increasing satisfaction levels, including our new work scheduling and customer contact system, workforce management.
Our regulator, Ofwat also measures us on customer satisfaction as part of the DG9 measure, using the results of their own surveys of 400 customers a year. This survey looks at satisfaction with call handling only. We scored 4.32 out of a possible 5 last year.
3,302 complaints were made about us in 2008/09 to our customer watchdog, the Consumer Council for Water. These represent the customer complaints that have not been resolved at earlier stages of our complaints handling process. The overall level of complaints received was 43,506 in 2008/09, an increase on the 2007/08 figure of 31,920. 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 the high level of complaints is in part due to specific issues such as the introduction during the year of site area charging for rainwater drainage, and the move from Post Office to Pay Zone for bill payments. We describe here and in our case study on customer satisfaction initiatives our efforts to address customer satisfaction and we believe that the further embedding of new customer systems and processes will help to reduce complaints.
We face challenges to maintain and improve satisfaction levels in the current economic climate, as water charges for more customers become a bigger part of the household budget. In addition, numbers of metered customers are increasing and statistics show that customers on meters have lower levels of satisfaction than those who receive unmetered water. This reflects differences in the complexity in the billing processes for the two types of customer and the need for initial support around water usage levels for customers changing onto meters.
Our move towards automated meter reading, simplifying our end-to-end processes and increased emphasis on helping customers with water efficiency will help here.