How our Customer Care Charter is creating better journeys for our customers

Why we created the Charter

Earlier this year, we launched our Customer Care Charter - a set of 12 commitments designed to help meet and exceed our customers’ needs. These commitments were shaped by research and feedback from both colleagues and customers, helping us focus on the areas that make the biggest difference.

Whether it’s supporting customers in vulnerable situations, enhancing our service levels, investing in water efficiency services and solutions or helping our customers save water and money, our Customer Care Charter is about doing the right thing. It’s our way of making sure every customer interaction is built on trust, transparency and care. You can read our 12 commitments here.

Listening, learning and improving

Since launching our Charter, one area we’ve been focused on is reviewing customer journeys to identify where we can make enhancements. We’ve looked at feedback across multiple channels, including Google and Trustpilot reviews as well as customer feedback and expressions of dissatisfaction, to understand how customers feel about their experiences with us.

This insight has helped us pinpoint areas for improvement and prioritise the journeys that matter most. This is part of our commitment to continuous learning and making sure our service evolves to meet our customers’ needs.

Improving our bereavement journey

One of the first customer journeys we prioritised was our bereavement journey. We recognised that this is an especially sensitive time for customers and that the process needed to be simpler and more empathetic.

Our Business Change and Continuous Improvement team supported a small group of colleagues to put themselves in our customers shoes to map out each step of the bereavement process, identifying opportunities to make the experience more compassionate and efficient. As a result, we made several changes to the process, including providing vulnerability training for frontline colleagues and reducing the average time to complete the process from 21 days to just one day.

Our Continuous Improvement Manager, Gill Cameron, commented:

"Customer Experience Journey mapping is one of the ways we bring the voice of the Customer into our everyday, to put ourselves in our customers' shoes and really understand our processes as our customers experience them, highlighting the opportunities to make improvements that will be seen and felt by our customers."

Turning insight into action

The insights we’ve gathered are already driving meaningful changes in the service we deliver, starting with the bereavement journey and extending to other key customer experiences. Guided by our Customer Care Charter, we’re committed to making every interaction simpler, more considered and developed around what matters most to our customers.

Read more about our Customer Care Charter here.