Customer care performance and improvements

To help provide proactive communications, we’ve:

• Promoted on social media, financial support available
• Communicated the price rise to customers in a range of ways. This included writing to 3.7 million customers
• Introduced a brand-new Incident Communication team
• Provided 88% of customers who contacted us about their wastewater services with updates
• Informed 87% of customers when work has been completed for water services

To improve our proactive communications, we're:

• Introducing a brand-new Incident Aftercare and Learning Manager role. They will drive improvements to service and communication to customers after an incident 

• Enhancing customer notifications about leaks. This will help customers manage their consumption and lower their bills.  

• Providing real-time consumption tracking and personalised recommendations on reducing their usage 

To improve being easier to contact, we've:

• Increased our team size by 20% to help with high demand across channels
• Answered calls within an average of 64 seconds for water and wastewater services. This was in the first half of the year.
• Had a low call abandonment rate of 4%

To improve being easy to contact, we're:

• Providing comprehensive retraining for all our frontline billing teams
• Testing new technologies like Amazon Q. It easily provides our staff with the most relevant knowledge
• Introducing a new 'customer support team'. They will assist customers in situations that are complex and/or require extra care
• Simplifying our phone system for billing and account queries. We've almost halved the length of our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) messaging

To help provide support for water and wastewater issues, we've: 

• Lowered water and wastewater complaints. We received 17,168 complaints, nearly 32% lower than last year
• Updated customers during an incident and provided compensation. This is in line with our Customer Guarantee Scheme
• Responded to over 87% of customers' wastewater issues on time
• Transitioned to a new work management system for our water network teams
• Responded quicker to customers who reported having no water

To improve support when things go wrong, we’re:

• Improving the resilience of Guildford’s water supply. We've completed over half of our £93 million project
• Increasing alternative water resources. This removes the need for alternative supplies to be delivered
• Driving improvements in how we support customers during and after incidents
• Installing monitors that provide real-time data on the health of our network
• Carrying out more sewer cleaning to prevent blockages 
• Improving how quickly we resolve issues with our wastewater network

To help provide support for billing and metering issues, we've:

• Reduced household billing complaints by 10%
• Lowered metering complaints by 12% 
• Decreased the volume of second-stage complaints with a 34% reduction over the year
• Prevented 5,488 complaints since April 2024. This is an impressive 93% complaints prevention rate

To improve support when things go wrong we’re:

• Introducing a dedicated Induction Champion
• Redesigning our Induction Training programme
• Increasing our focus on customer journeys and experiences

To help support customers in vulnerable circumstances, we’ve:

• Helped tailor services for those needing extra support on Priority Services (PSR). We've surpassed our target by 18%, with over 606,751 customers registered
• Retained our Inclusive Service Kitemark certification for a fifth year
• Received feedback that 85% of PSR customers are satisfied with our service
• Published our Vulnerability Strategy. It sets out our plans for 2025 to 2030 for providing extra help to those who need it

To improve our understanding of our customers’ needs, we’re:

• Improving welcome letters for PSR customers to be more personalised
• Updating our Customer Guarantee Scheme. We've added commitments to credit customers’ accounts with £40. This is if we don't provide PSR and bill literature in their required format. It also applies if we don't deliver bottled water during an incident
• Implementing a new process. Customers who need extra or bespoke help can contact us so we can discuss their requirements

To help customers struggling to pay their bills, we’ve:

• Continued to support customers with financial support
• Completed 84,985 financial support reviews
• Provided £78 million of support through our social tariff scheme
• Launched an online income and expenditure form

To help customers struggling to pay their bills, we’re:

• Piloting a proactive data-sharing approach with policy in practice. We'll be identifying customers eligible for our affordability support who have not applied
• Helping thousands of London households through auto-enrolment. We expect to provide c.£10 million of financial support to a further 18 boroughs
• Increasing the amount of support distributed through our Extra Support Scheme. The aim is to be above the £25m distributed this year