Water: The challenge of innovating for customers

“As a regulated monopoly, it restricts how we can think creatively about customer propositions and customer experience.” The customer transformation chief at a water company expands on their point. “There is a legacy Water Board mentality. We don’t need to get customers to switch. We don’t need to get customers to be loyal to us. They don’t have a choice.

“But we are also operating alongside people’s contemporary experience of gas and electricity.” They note there have been experiments with tariff innovation such as rising block tariffs. “But in our region, water is seen as plentiful. It falls out of the sky on an almost daily basis.” And there’s an attitude of ‘get your own house in order’ before you talk to customers drip-fed a diet of bad news about the sector about consumption.

Data will play a huge part in changing how challenges such as leakage are addressed. There are already examples of it being used to good effect to encourage customers to fix leaks at the company. “That’s only going to accelerate with smart meter data. But ahead of smart meters, the data is limited.”

With bills rising and billions being spent on investment in AMP8, there’s also pressure to cut costs. Increasing online contact with customers is seen as a means of reducing cost to serve. But it’s vital those all-important C-MeX scores aren’t impacted. Improved customer experience is underpinned by understanding the data about them.

But there are challenges. “Data-rich and insight-poor is an issue. Data is siloed in operational systems and functions, with big variations in quality and consistency.” Ask networks and billing who your customers are, and you will get different answers. In their job, “there is very little capacity for data self-serve. I always have to ask for data, and it drives me barmy. I can’t just go in and ferret it out.”

The delegate says water is lagging energy in use of data and is well behind telecoms. “I am hoping in five years’ time data quality will improve. There will be standardisation and the ability to interrogate – that’s all coming.

“But I think we are five years off being able to do anything particularly sexy with our proposition.”