Southern Water has reported an 18% drop in written billing complaints since April as part of our Customer Service Improvement programme.
The transformational programme will deliver improvements to our billing and digital services. We also launched three new online journeys at the end of August to make it easier for customers to pay their bill, submit meter readings or close their account online.
Since 2015 Southern Water has seen a significant reduction in customer complaints, falling by 70% between 2015 and 2018. In 2019/20 complaints did rise as services transitioned to a new model. Overall between 2015 and 2019/20 the reduction achieved was 68%.
Head of Customer Service at Southern Water, Donna Howden, said: “Over the last five years we’ve been making huge strides in improving the overall service we provide to customers but we know there is more to do. That is why we launched our Customer Service Improvement Programme in April 2020.
“This will deliver a better experience to our customers across a number of areas and we’re already seeing an improvement in the success of customers completing our new online journeys since we introduced them in August.
“We’re also using insight into our complaints to ensure we’re focusing on the changes our customers want to see. As well as customer feedback, we’ll also continue to work closely with regulators and key partners to ensure we improve our service.”
We’re making improvements across a number of areas to make things quicker, easier and more convenient for our customers.
This includes introducing Amazon Contact telephony and chat platform and new automated customer identification and verification to allow us to serve customers quicker.
The majority of our indicators show improvement across a number of areas that have been targeted, such as first contact resolution, which has improved to 76% this year.
