Asking customers if they support our future performance commitments
Our plans for the future focus on outcomes. These are the promises we’ve made to our customers on the services they want us to deliver.
Between March and April 2018 we shared our proposed promises for the period 2020-2025 with customers – these are the commitments we plan to make to improve the service we offer. The promises themselves were developed from the feedback received from more than 12,000 customers over the previous year, but we wanted to make sure they covered all the important areas and that they were clear and made sense. We also wanted customers to help us set a number of the performance targets for our promises that they wanted us to achieve by 2025 - this way we can be sure our plans meet their expectations.
Overall, our customers said they supported the promises and commitments we’ve made for the period 2020-2025. In summary, customers told us that:
We have used all the feedback from customers to finalise our customer promises for the period 2020 to 2025. You can read more about the 28 promises we are making in our business plan.
We invited 26 Cambridge Water household customers, non-bill payers and small business owners to an all-day event in April 2018. Here, we used a series of fun activities to take them through each of our customer promises. This was so that we could understand their views and also how they wanted us to manage their bills between 2020 and 2025.
Specifically, we asked for their feedback on the areas that were most important to them. We also asked if they supported plans for a multi-million-pound investment to upgrade our two water treatment works in our South Staffs region.
During April, we asked customers to complete an interactive online survey, enabling them to give us feedback on the same issues discussed with customers at the all-day event.
A total of 248 customers took part in this.
This response gave us the confidence that we’d spoken to a wide range of different customers to understand where they wanted us to most focus our efforts.
After a thorough selection process, we chose the independent research agency, Explain Research, to carry out this study. This is so that the feedback we receive is totally independent and unbiased.
The independent customer panel also reviewed and challenged how we approached this work. This was so we could be sure we asked customers the right questions and that we correctly interpreted what they said.