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WATER COMPANY | CUSTOMER RESOLUTION CASE STUDY 2023
Water Company Invests In Measuring Customer Satisfaction
Water and waste water treatment company implements EQ’s complaints and feedback management technology to monitor and improve customer satisfaction
Introduction
As one of the main suppliers of fresh drinking water to over 2 million people, our client supplies 552 million litres of drinking water and treats and recycles 1,400 million litres of wastewater.
Supplies 552 million litres of drinking water and also treats and recycles 1,400 million litres of wastewater.
Regulated by Ofwat, our client is duty-bound to ensure complete customer satisfaction through good quality and safe water, as well as offering fair prices. Ofwat also monitors customer service quality and splits their yearly feedback audit into five categories. Whilst this categorisation was possible using the company’s old system, our client could never be 100% sure that it was done to the highest possible standards because of the way in which they previously recorded complaints.
The Challenge
After incurring fines for late feedback to customers, as well as issues with its yearly audit, our client decided it needed to drastically improve its customer services, and quickly. To achieve this, it needed a high-quality system implemented within three months. After interviewing three companies, EQ Charter was selected to implement its customer feedback and management solution.
We wanted a system installed within two to three months as customer feedback was a big issue to the company. The challenge was to improve our handling of customer complaints and establish a system that was not causing issues when it came to auditing to the regulator.”
Customer Relations Manager
The Solution
The Manager added:
“Before EQ Charter was engaged on the project, all complaints were put into a spreadsheet, creating a lot of grey areas and not making the most out of productivity. Additionally, if complaints are not dealt with in ten days or less, the penalty applies, costing the company money.”
Our EQ customer complaints technology team implemented the system within three months so that the issue of quality of feedback could be dealt with efficiently.
The Benefits
Our client prides itself on offering high standards of customer care; it has a modern control centre and call centre dealing with 5,000 customer queries daily. Of complaints received, 98.5% of these are handled within ten days. The types of complaints we deal with for our client are DG7 and DG9 (e.g. written and phone complaints respectively).
Our client offers a promise to customers that a certain level of service will be maintained. This is regarding customer feedback issues such as replying to queries and complaints and payment arrangements. If the level of service promised is not delivered, then compensation is given.
Our working relationship with Equiniti is very good. One period when they were particularly helpful was when we changed our billing process. Naturally, a number of people were not happy with us for doing this as they felt it was confusing. Luckily, the system EQ Charter supplied us with helped us to manage each of our customer complaints in an efficient manner. If we had not implemented EQ Charter’s model and continued using the old way of doing things, we would have struggled to appease our customers to an acceptable level.”
Customer Relations Manager
The Future
Our client is now looking at changing some of the classifications of its customers’ complaints and a lot of the changes made have been in accordance with Ofwat; due to specific reporting compliance. The company has expressed interest in upgrading its system and making it web based. This would mean integrating our technology with SAP. The main benefits of this would be that employees could access the system via the web instead of at the company offices.
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