UK’s water industry regulator Ofwat has come out with the findings of its latest consumer survey report and, according to it, South Staffs Water, a water supply company for England and Wales, has been praised by its customer for delivering excellent services.
Ofwat’s service incentive mechanism (SIM) is an initiative to ensure that water utilities based in UK deliver what their customers expect. Based on both qualitative and quantitative measures, SIM’s survey reports help utilities to improve the level of their services. This year, SIM evaluated 21 water companies in England and Wales and South Staffs was ranked number one among all the 21 companies evaluated.
As said above, SIM’s evaluation is based on two consumer experience measures—quantitative and qualitative.
While the first helps to find out the number of times a company fails to meet the expectations of its consumers, the second helps to know about the experience of those consumers. A survey is conducted to gather consumer experience data.
The survey is conduced on a quarterly basis. Customers are asked about their opinion about certain aspects of the provider which include:
Both regions of South Staffs Water reportedly experienced improvement over the previous year’s scores. To the utter satisfaction of these two providers, their customers held that when it came to keeping the customers informed on the progress of an issue the water company has improved a lot over their last year’s performance. In addition, the time taken to resolve an issue has also shrunk. The customers surveyed also informed that they are more satisfied with the visits they receive from the water company.
“We have worked extremely hard over the past year to improve customer service standards, particularly by listening to what our customers tell us. But achieving first place will not be the end of the work; we are committed to continual improvement and will be working even harder to try to remain in first place,” customer services director for South Staffs Water Rachel Barber noted in a statement.