Featured in this report: Water
Over the past few years, CCW have looked at customers’ views on value for money and fairness of charges and highlighted what water companies can do to improve these scores. This time they carried out analysis to understand what underlying factors are influencing customers’ perceptions of value for money and fairness.
CCW found that feeling able to trust the company and feeling that the company cares have become more important drivers of perceptions since last year. Companies could increase their customers’ scores on value for money and fairness, if they work on maintaining or improving their customers’ perceptions of care and levels of trust.
CCW have said in the past that water companies can improve positive perceptions of their performance by making every contact count – whether this is a complaint, a request for information or a query about services. There are a number of measures in Water Matters that relate to this type of activity. CCW used these to develop a customer engagement score so that they could understand how effective water companies have been in this area. CCW analysed how the customer engagement score changed over time and how it varied across different customer groups to gain a clearer picture of where greater effort is needed. The average customer engagement score is disappointingly low and reflects the fact that the proportion of customers with low, medium or high engagement is generally around a third each. Companies’ individual customer profiles will vary and there is more work that they can do to identify how to improve their customers’ customer engagement scores.
