Looking after our customers

Improving communications

We want to improve our customer service to that of a leading company, at the same time as increasing efficiency by reducing the average cost of managing our customers' accounts.

Much of our plan concerns our proposals to improve the water and sewerage services we supply. These are key to ensure we provide the basics of customer service - for example, providing a reliable supply of tap water and ensuring we reduce the risk of sewer flooding.

The issue that is often of most concern to customers, however, are the ease with which they can contact us and resolve their query.

We aim to improve our communications with customers. We have already begun this process by making major improvements to our Customer Centre, so that calls can more easily be directed to the right person and dealt with in a more helpful and timely fashion.

We are also establishing a new IT management system that will give our staff a better overview of all the information we hold.

Increasing customer satisfaction

Our plans include further improvements to try to ensure the way we deal with customers' enquiries really satisfies their needs, and that they can contact us using the method they want - for example, by paying their bill online or using 'self-service' options on the telephone.

Our regulator Ofwat is already discussing a new measure of this, to assess 'customer experience'. We welcome this move, which will help us provide better service in 2010 to 2015.

These changes will help us boost the proportion of enquiries we can resolve when people first contact us, rather than having to ring or write again.  We want to significantly reduce the number of these 'repeat contacts', and also intend to halve the number of complaints we receive.

The improvements will also help us to reduce costs, the benefits of which will be passed on to customers.