Yorkshire Water achieves significant results with a one year customer engagement programme
We’ve recently completed a year long behavioural science based customer engagement programme for Yorkshire Water and have achieved some significant results. Yorkshire Water provides clean water and sanitation for over five million people across the Yorkshire and Humberside region. As part of its commitment to continually exploring and developing new ways to do things better, it approached Advizzo with a combination of three requirements:
- To help drive down customer water consumption and reduce leaks as part of Defra’s Plan for Water.
- To improve its customer engagement and customer experience
- To improve its understanding of its customers and its customer portfolio i.e. the types of houses, households and water consumption behaviours/habits
Working together with Yorkshire Water we designed and deployed a customer engagement programme that was conducted on over 400 homes with AMI smart meters – meters that provide monthly, daily as well as hourly meter reads. The customers selected by Yorkshire Water to be included in the programme were living in different types of property in Sheffield, including new builds, traditional Victorian houses and a mix of rented and owned.
Using the AMI smart meter data we sent monthly paper-based reports to customers within the programme. These reports contained insights into their water consumption as well as neighbour comparisons, to reveal how their usage compared to similar homes within their neighbourhood. The reports also provided each customer with tips on how to save water based on their household and water consumption patterns.
The information within the reports are based on the principles of nudging to reduce water consumption. Nudging is a behavioural science theory based on the premise that people are often unable to make good decisions when they lack experience, context, knowledge or are overcome with inertia. The solution involves guiding or nudging people in the right direction – towards the more beneficial option.
Read more about how our customer engagement programme prove that the nudge theory reduces water consumption.
The customers involved in Yorkshire Water’s customer engagement programme also had access to an online portal which provided them with a personalised action plan and access to a survey. Our surveys are bespoke to each client’s engagement programme and designed to obtain more information on the characteristics of the property, as well as the people residing in the property, and their habits relating to water consumption.
Very encouraging results
This combination of personalised engagement, Behavioural Science based nudges to encourage customers to be mindful and use less water, as well as access to the portal helped Yorkshire Water achieve all three of its aims. Whilst we would always recommend conducting engagement programmes on a much larger subset of customers, we still managed to achieve very encouraging and significant results with the 400+ customers involved in this year long programme.
Very encouraging results
- 9% reduction in water consumption over the course of 12 months
- 71% of customers completed the online survey providing valuable detail to enhance Yorkshire Waters understanding of its customer base
- 58% of customers revisited the online portal – demonstrating success in the customer engagement criteria for the project
It is also significant that those customers that didn’t engage with the online portal still reduced their water consumption. For example, one customer who didn’t engage online, but took action having received the paper reports each month, reduced their usage by 24% in 2022 vs 2021. Another reduced their usage by 11% in 2022 versus 2021.This demonstrates the value of the monthly paper reports and the fact that proactive engagement alone is a key driver of water savings over the long term.
As a result of this programme Yorkshire Water not only have far greater understanding of its customer portfolio and their consumption habits, but have succeeded in encouraging a proportion of their customer base to reduce their water usage. Yorkshire Water now has a much stronger business case to scale up their engagement programme and achieve even greater engagement and reduction in water consumption and leaks.