Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/1223154
South East Water's website lets customers see maps of the roads near their property showing planned works or unexpected disruptions. They can drop a pin to tell the company the exact location of a leak. "The ability to use smartphones and to develop technology that will give us more accurate reporting of leaks is an emerging thing. We want to make it easy and frictionless for customers to do that," Clowes says. "The hard bit is getting the message out that this technology is avail- able," he adds. Establishing trust But the bigger picture, and what's under- pinning a lot of activity related to C-MeX and D-Mex, is developing trust, and "growing our relationship with custom- ers," says Collinge. Solving the industry's twin challenges — shortage of supply and flooding — will depend to a large extent on customers listening to and taking on board messages about behaviour change. "If I am going to listen to what you say, I need to trust you first," says Clowes. He believes that visibility and communica- tion at community level is critical to building trust. "In one case, we saw that customers' trust improved in a scenario where we'd closed the roads over several months for a big project. Our net promoter score went up a full 25 points. They were www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | APRIL 2020 | 21 seeing us invest in their community," he says. A part of this bigger picture sees water utilities looking to improve the quality of their interactions with customers. "We have challenges in Hull with flooding. Knowing that, we took the approach of going into local schools and the local councils and working with them in a partnership approach. We wanted to get customers to understand what we do as an organisation including why we may disrupt their water supply. That way, they experience it less as a disruption and more as the solution to a problem that will prevent further upheaval in future," says Collinge. "We found that they were a lot more understanding and recognised the value of what we deliver. In AMP7, our focus will be to shi' from a reactive, 'we're-telling-you-something's-going-to- happen', to a proactive, 'let's-build-a- sustainable-relationship," she adds. Such partnerships are designed to engage customers in a continuous con- versation about water and are especially effective at reaching vulnerable custom- ers. South East Water installed pop ups in the foyers of Asda stores and has pooled resources with energy suppliers, through UK Power Networks, to approach Age UK. "Customers don't want to engage with every single utility company so we've started to work closely with energy distribution network operators (DNOs) to partner with local organisations already trusted by communities. We find that peo- ple are much more engaged through those partnerships. They enable us to get out messages and information, and likewise provide a route into us for customers," Clowes says. The developer market is different, but here, again, winning hearts and minds is considered vital to delivering a good customer experience and therefore a respectable D-MeX score. Severn Trent has formed its business to serve three distinct customer segments; big housing develop- ers, self-lay providers - contractors that in- stall assets on behalf of developers - and smaller, one-off project owners. Self-lay providers are a growing part of the market and they are keen to establish a consist- ent set of technical standards across the country in order to promote competition. Betteridge says: "Self-lay providers are as- sessing the relative performance of water utilities they are dealing with. As a water company, if you are front and promoting standardisation in the industry, and are at the forefront of that, as we are, you'll get recognised for it through the survey results. So there is a link between work- ing proactively in the industry and the D-MeX." Yorkshire Water partnered with Hull City Council and the Royal Institute of British Architects to run the Living With Water competition. Copyright credit: Harper Perry Architects.