The customer engagement programme that Advizzo and South East Water have completed in order to reduce water consumption, demonstrates that the programme does not have any adverse impact on the number of customer calls to the company, and could deliver advantages towards the new C-MeX measures.
South East Water’s C-MeX goals
Within its 2020-2025 business plan1 South East Water has set itself bold and ambitious commitments in terms of performance, but more importantly customer satisfaction. A new UK water company model has been introduced in 2020 by the UK water regulator OFWAT. The new service penalty and rewards model is based on C-MeX scores and replaces the Service Incentive Mechanism (SIM).
With C-MeX, OFWAT not only measures the views of customers who call their water company, but also surveys randomly selected customers to gauge their ‘satisfaction’ with their water supplier.
For the last three years South East Water and Advizzo have been working together to implement a water usage engagement programme, which involves sending selected customers water usage reports, as well as tips and advice on water conservation. With the launch of C-MeX, South East Water was keen to demonstrate that a water usage customer engagement programme does not hinder its C-MeX scores by increasing the number of calls to customer services.
We analysed the number of calls from customers within the engagement programme versus the number of calls from customers not in the programme.
Our findings clearly demonstrate that the customer engagement programme has no significant impact on call volumes, and that the programme, when implemented correctly, has a positive impact on customer perception and satisfaction.
Advizzo was therefore particularly pleased to be able to report to South East Water that, having analysed the reasons that customers contacted the company, customers who received Advizzo’s water usage reports were more likely to be calling about water efficiency devices than other customers.