Over the last five years United Utilities has been on a journey to improve customer service. At the heart of it has been listening to what our customers have to say and focusing on what’s important to them.

Our strategy has been to focus on the three key principles our customers have said are important – Speed, friendliness and service recovery.

Speed

In the modern world we live in, we all expect things to happen quickly. We changed our opening hours to make ourselves more accessible, introduced new customer channels, including a new app, where you can pay online or submit a meter reading. One of the real benefits of expanding our presence on digital platforms is that we now have 750,000 customers who interact with us digitally.

Fundamentally, we looked at all our service levels, stopped being solely guided by regulatory standards and started to be driven by customer expectations.

We’ve established areas for improvements and now ensure that we immediately contact all customers who have contacted us to complain. We acknowledge receipt of the complaint, apologise and most important, we explain how we are going to put things right.

And we’ve not stopped there. We now issue refunds in 24 hours and are focused on reducing our time to process many of the transactions that customers find really important to them.

Moving home is a great example. We now have a dedicated moving home team. The team does everything, from making sure a customer is on the right tariff and payment plan, to offering advice on the benefits of a water meter. But most of all, we inject some personality into this interaction as we know how stressful moving is.

It’s a real value added service to make sure a customer can get through to someone, via a channel they choose and make sure everything is done quickly and to their satisfaction.

Friendliness

All too often, processes and interactions with customers become standardised. We became obsessed with customer scripts, as opposed to empowering our people to have a great conversation with a customer and respond accordingly.

We have spent a great deal of time changing our tone of voice and how we interact with our customers. Treating them as friends is key in helping build a rapport. As a result customers start to trust us, helping break down those myths of being a faceless big organisation.

Service recovery

When running and operating a utility business, from time to time we will get things wrong. From a burst water main or delaying commuters getting on with their daily life due to roadworks. One of the big things we’ve focused on is when we get it wrong to actually say we’re sorry and deal with it quickly.

It’s fair to say you can turn a negative interaction into a positive one. By empowering our people we can pleasantly surprise a customer with how we deal with their problem. The amount of praise and feedback we get from customers saying they had a problem, but have been blown away with the way it has been dealt with it, is extraordinary.

Technology is also key. Keeping pace with evolving technology plays a pivotal role in helping to meet the needs and expectations of our customers. We have invested a substantial amount in technology. Everything from telephony routing, to creating many digital channels so customers can get in touch with us without needing to telephone.

This technology is helping improve customer service, and developing these channels remains vital to our success. This area is fast-paced and constantly changing and we will continue to focus and adapt to make sure we are offering customers a choice on how they would like to engage with us.

Celebrating great customer service

We believe it’s about getting all the elements of customer service in place and we recognise our employees are key to delivering great customer service.

It’s important we celebrate great service, when we get it right. One of the big things we introduced is The WOW! Awards. These awards have been instrumental in enabling customers to give our employees direct feedback on the great service they have delivered.

We’ve had 77 colleagues getting over a hundred nominations from customers and over the six years being involved with The WOW! Awards, 24,000 customers have taken part and hearing the fantastic feedback is wonderful. When customers tell us what we have done right, it really encourages us to do more.

One of the big advantages of these awards is that they have helped drive a really strong customer service culture throughout the whole business.

Accessibility and affordability

Investing time to proactively talk to our customers is significant in achieving customer satisfaction. One of the things we now do when bills go out is to hold roadshows across our region offering help and advice on how customers can lower their water bills. We have specialist advisors on hand with tips on how to reduce water costs and ways to help with budgeting household bills.

In our region we have 48 of the most deprived council wards in the UK. We already offer a wide range of financial assistance schemes to support our most vulnerable customers, but we are challenging ourselves to improve the scale and effectiveness of the support we offer.

In January this year we held our first ever affordability summit in Liverpool, where we brought together organisations from across the region who deal with customers in challenging circumstances to discuss what more can be done to support those struggling to make ends meet.

This event was trending on Twitter nationally, which really helped raise awareness of affordability issues in the North West and some of the challenges we’ve actually got. It’s all part of being a strong corporate citizen and having a place improving people’s lives.

Customer service is a way of life

The focus and drive to deliver great customer service is relentless. We have to be curious. Why are customers dissatisfied and also why are they satisfied? We constantly look at innovation, what can we do differently? One of the key things we’ve found on our journey is the importance of engaging with our employees. This has had some fantastic results. Many of the improvements in service have come about through changes in process and policies suggested by our employees.

We are delighted to see the improvements in SIM, placing us first out of all 18 companies in Wave 4 last year and in third place out of 18 for the year, but one of the best things is this performance has been echoed by the UK Institute of Customer Service index, which has recognised United Utilities as the most improved utility in the UK and the fourth most improved brand across the country as a whole.

That’s testomy to everyone’s hard work. We’ve had a relentless focus and drive on how we can make today better than yesterday and how can we make tomorrow better than today.