Becoming a customer-centric utility is a top priority of water businesses around the country. But what does that mean in a non-competitive environment?
While our customers value water, they don’t generally think about how it makes it to their taps or gets taken away from their homes. So what do they see as value for money from their water utility? How do we create a great experience for our customers when they interact with us? How do we engage with them to understand what is important to them and guide our investment decisions? These are just some of the areas that the WSAA’s Customer and Community network are tackling as part of their work program.
The program addresses the following objectives:
- Develop an understanding of leading practice customer engagement, particularly in terms of what drives ‘customer value’
- Develop relevant customer indicators and incorporate customer preferences into utility and regulatory decision-making processes
Current projects
The network is working on identifying and developing a set of customer performance indicators that measure what matters to customers, as well as looking how we can benchmark customer performance.
Understanding what makes a great customer experience, or more importantly finding and addressing those pain points is a priority for utilities. The network is exploring research on customer segments to understand what matters to different groups of customers, how they want to interact and communicate with their utility and what other products and services they might need or expect.
This also links into with the digital strategy of water utilities as many of our younger and future customers do not want to communicate with their water utility over the phone. New channels need to be designed and developed with our customers and understanding what can make or break these new channels is a priority for the network.
How to get involved
The Customer and Community network is a strategic network, made up of the General Managers of Customer Service (or equivalent) from WSAA members. The network has set up a few sub-groups for customer service practitioners, all of which have their own portal and all WSAA members are welcome to join:
- The Customer Resource Network: This is for all customer service practitioners. There is a workshop every year designed to share the outcomes of projects, develop recommendations for next steps and for the new work program and share experiences, case studies, and research.
- The Customer Engagement Project: This page on the portal is specifically for customer engagement activities, research, case studies and for discussion between members. There is also a public online library on the WRAP.
- The Non-Residential Customers Group: To share strategies, structures, and research on non-residential customers.
25 Oct 2016
