To help us track our customer satisfaction we have developed six attitudinal segments. This approach means we go beyond understanding what the average customer thinks of us to having far greater insight into their varying views and priorities.
Each year we contact 2,400 customers at random to understand, from your point of view, what we’re doing well and where we can improve, reacting to comments made on a variety of subjects.
Segmented satisfaction of household customers (scroll down for results)
Each year we survey customers for each of our six customer attitudinal segments below to understand whether they consider the:
- Appearance of their tap water to be acceptable
- Taste and odour of their water to be acceptable
- Level of leakage to be acceptable
- Direct interaction they’ve had with us to be positive
- Water supply they receive has sufficient pressure
- Frequency and duration of supply interruptions to be acceptable
- Frequency of water use restrictions to be acceptable
Surveying our customers in this way is an innovative new approach for us and the industry too and one where we have also set ourselves stretching targets.
Although this is a new measure for the 2020 to 2025 period, we have surveyed customer segments previously and the targets across all these measures were set following our performance between July 2017 and March 2018. From that position we have built into the targets improvement across all measures.
How have we performed?
The results of each of the six segments are shown below.
Having tracked our key questions on which the attitudinal segment scoring is based, we recognised there was very little upward movement in score despite the improvements we felt we were making in performance.
When we set these targets back in 2019, we also set ourselves the challenge to increase them over the five years to 2025. Due to the changing landscape this is a considerable challenge to achieve. Despite this, we still set ourselves high ambitions to focus on lifting customer scores in all these areas to ensure our continued focus on improving.
During 2023/24 we didn’t achieve our target across all six segments. This reflects a reduction in customer satisfaction across all sectors according to the UK Customer Services Index. We do, however, continue to see improvements in other areas of our customer satisfaction measures.
We continue to build upon our strong Customer Satisfaction improvement programme, which includes promoting our corporate social responsibility and improving brand awareness, digital presence, self-serve transactions as well as implementing an omni-channel approach.
We have seen other strong improvement indicators such as maintaining our Institute of Customer Service Servcheck accreditation with distinction. We are now one of just 22 organisations in the UK to receive this accreditation at distinction standard. We also achieved our re-accreditation of the BS ISO 22458 Inclusive Service Kitemark in recognition of our commitment to supporting vulnerable customers.
Mindful Optimists
Within the Mindful Optimists segment, we have a target score of 4.4 out of five.
At the end of the year, we scored 3.7 out of five, 0.7 below our target.
This customer segment dropped by 0.1 over the year with downturns in customer satisfaction around the frequency of water use restrictions and frequency and duration of supply interruptions.
Global Advocates
With the Global Advocates segment, we had a target score of 4.4 out of five.
Our end-of-year performance score achieved 3.9 out of five, 0.1 down on last year.
This segment’s satisfaction with the appearance of their water is high and exceeds the overall target at 4.5. Levels of leakage (-0.2) and frequency of water use restrictions (-0.4) continue to be key drivers in the reduction in overall satisfaction in this customer segment.
Careful neighbours
Within the Careful Neighbours segment, we had a target score of 4.4 out of five.
At the end of the year, we achieved 4.0 out of five, which was the highest score of any segment, however remains below target.
This segment achieved target performance across three of the seven key questions; their water supply being of sufficient pressure, the frequency and duration of interruptions and the appearance of their water, which achieved the highest score of any segment and key question at 4.6.
Just me and mine
Within the Just Me and Mine segment, we had a target score of 4.4 out of five.
At the end of the year, we scored 3.8 out of five, down 0.1 from last year.
This segment has seen a year-on-year improvement in satisfaction associated to the pressure of their water supply. Level of leakage and frequency and duration of interruptions are again key questions in which we see downturns.
Busy juggler
Within the Busy Juggler segment, we had a target score of 4.4 out of five.
At the end of the year our performance was 3.9 out of five, which was down 0.1 from last year.
This segment also saw an improvement in satisfaction associated to their water supply pressure from 2022-2023. As with the other segments, satisfaction with the frequency of water use restrictions continues to be a key influence of decline.
Living for today
Within the Living for Today segment, we had a target score of 4.4 out of five.
At the end of the year, we scored 3.7 out of five, below our target by 0.2.
This segment experienced the most significant year-over-year improvement of any key question across any segment. This was for satisfaction of the appearance of their water. However, this segment also achieved the most significant reduction in a key question score over the same period; again relating to the frequency of water use restrictions, which dropped 0.5 points.
