Improved customer contact

We aim for the highest levels of customer satisfaction. An important part of this is how we respond to customers who contact us.

We are very highly rated for our responsiveness to customers – in terms of the initial contacts made and the way in which customers’ issues are deal with. Nevertheless, we are continually working to improve the way in which we work and the services offered.

Training, monitoring and technical systems for handling customers all have a part to play. We also keep track of best practice among businesses outside the water sector.

Our customer service teams

We have continued to work hard over the last year to improve customer satisfaction and were pleased to achieve the government standard Customer Service Excellence Award. Across the business we are continuing to raise awareness and expectations.

Our operational enquiries customer service staff deal with approximately 600 calls a day – totalling around 150,000 calls a year. This fluctuates, increasing to 1,500 calls in one day during an incident such as a burst water main.

During 2009-10 we answered nearly 97.5% of these calls within 30 seconds and only had a 0.5% abandoned rate, which is among the best in the industry and considerably smaller than Ofwat’s target of 1.1%.

Our customer service billing staff at BWBSL answered around 817,000 calls in 2009-2010 and 99.5% were answered within 30 seconds, with an average response time of 4.1 seconds.

Annual billing (March and April) is our busiest time and on a peak day about 6,000 calls can be taken.

In addition to our inbound calls we made around 30,000 outbound calls in 2008-09 about customer payments.

Improving customer service

To further improve customer service, during 2009-10 we introduced:

• a named contact for customers, ensuring communication is maintained during a job’s progress 
• proactively calling customers after a job is completed to check the customer is happy with the work carried out 
• analysing root causes of complaints, Guaranteed Standards Scheme (GSS) payments and repeat contacts to spot trends and recommend improvements to existing practices.

Implementing our customer contact system to give a one-stop-shop will help this. It will show customer history and other information to help more issues to be identified and solved, and work scheduled on initial contact.

Behind the scenes

We aim to get our sites running normally as quickly as possible in an emergency, as well as carrying out planned maintenance work.

In 2008 we set up our multi-skilled asset maintenance team (AMT). This has been working well and was designed as a rapid response group.

Their assignment?

To deal quickly with any repair job, whether large or small – ranging from emergency repairs to planned work.

During 2009-10 work included cleaning, repairing and reinstalling giant sewage filter membranes, tank emptying and repair work, building maintenance and floor relaying.

Planned maintenance work prevents the need for expensive kit replacements and frees our operators to focus on their daily roles.

What does this mean?

Less impact on customers and the environment, reduced costs to us and making our sites safer places to work.

AMT re-use or recycle items where possible, reducing waste sent to landfill. Costs are saved in other ways as well, eg, maintaining and repairing plant is cheaper than buying it new.