Industry-first Charter drives customer care across water sector

ONE of the UK’s leading water retailers has published an annual progress report for its industry-first Customer Care Charter, highlighting improvements in customer satisfaction, service standards and sustainability performance across the past year.

Business Stream introduced the Customer Care Charter in 2025 following colleague and customer engagement, with the initiative setting out 12 commitments across four key areas: Simple and Easy, Trust, Experience and Expertise, and Care.

The retailer has met 20 of the 30 measures established to track progress during the Charter’s first year, with a further six in progress.

Jo Mayes, Customer Services Director at Business Stream, said: “As a customer-centric business, we wanted our Charter to be much more than a set of promises. From the outset, our aim was to create a framework that genuinely helps hold us to account, drives continuous improvement and provides greater transparency around the service we deliver.

“This first annual report demonstrates the progress we’ve made across a wide range of areas, while also helping us identify where we can continue to improve and evolve our services in line with customers’ needs.”

Among the key milestones within the report is the company achieving a 91% customer satisfaction score and maintaining its ‘Excellent’ Trustpilot rating. In addition, the company is rolling out it’s live webchat service to customers and has made improvements to its My Business Stream digital portal, allowing customers to manage their water use at a time that suits them.

Alongside customer service improvements identified through proactive customer engagement, the Charter report details significant progress across sustainability, water efficiency and customer support initiatives.

Since 2020, Business Stream has helped customers save 7.9billion litres of water and delivered more than £15million in water and energy efficiency savings through investment in data analytics, water efficiency services and smart reporting tools.

The report also highlights the company’s wider environmental and social value progress, including delivering over 1,000 community support hours and reducing its emissions by 66% against its 2018-19 base year (with a 7% reduction achieved in 2025-26) as it works towards its net zero goal.

Business Stream says customer insight has played a central role in shaping the Charter and the improvements delivered during its first year.

Further details on the Customer Care Charter and the annual progress report can be found here.