Environment

Our business is intrinsically linked to the environment as we rely on it for our raw product, water. For this reason we do all we can to ensure there is a clean, resilient and sustainable supply available for current and future water customers whilst ensuring there is enough water available to support the needs of the environment too. Click 'Discover More' to find out more from our Head of Environment, Emma Goddard.

People

Our people are dedicated to providing you with the best service possible, whether they’re out in the field searching for leaks, managing our operational sites, testing the quality of your water or answering your queries. Each and every person within the business is dedicated to delivering you the safe reliable tap water supply you expect. Click 'Discover more' to find out more from our Head of HR, Sian Jenkins.

Last updated 10-07-23

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.

In 2022/23 we underachieved on our target across all six segments. 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 20 organisations in the UK to receive this accreditation at distinction standard.

Mindful Optimists

Within the Mindful Optimists segment, we have a target score of 4.3 out of five.

At the end of the year, we scored 3.8 out of five, 0.5 below our target.

This customer segment dropped by 0.2 over the year with significant downturns in customer satisfaction around leakage levels and the frequency of water use restrictions. Acceptability of leakage continues to be the lowest score for this group of customers (2.8 out of five).

Mindful optimists

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 4.0 out of five, 0.2 down on last year.

This customer segment saw small downturns across six of the seven key questions with only this segment’s acceptability of the appearance of their water remaining consistent with last year. The most significant downturns were experienced on acceptability around leakage levels (-0.5) and frequency of water use restrictions (-0.4).

Global advocates

Careful neighbours

Within the Careful Neighbours segment, we had a target score of 4.3 out of five.

At the end of the year, we achieved 4.1 out of five, which was the highest score of any segment, but just below our target.

The score for the appearance of tap water being acceptable was the highest scoring key question for the second consecutive year, achieving 4.5 out of five.

Careful neighbours

Just me and mine

Within the Just Me and Mine segment, we had a target score of 4.3 out of five.

At the end of the year, we scored 3.9 out of five, down 0.1 from last year.

This segment’s score is in response of the acceptability of leakage levels which was the lowest across any key question, for any segment, scoring 2.6 out of 5. This is down 0.3 from last year.

Just me and mine

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 4.0 out of five, which was down 0.1 from last year.

This segment saw reductions across six of the seven key questions with only the question relating to the acceptability of the appearance of water remaining consistent with last year. Again, the most significant downturns were seen in the questions relating to leakage and water use restrictions.

Busy juggler

Living for today

Within the Living for Today segment, we had a target score of 4.3 out of five.

At the end of the year, we scored 3.9 out of five, below our target by 0.4.

This segment saw four of the seven key questions remain at the same score as last year. As with all previous segments, their acceptability of leakage levels and water us restrictions is at a lower level of satisfaction than last year, but the downturn has not been as significant as other segments.

Living for today

Case Studies

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Record-breaking heatwave and drought

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