Our strategies and plans
Our customer engagement and feedback programme
Having access to clean drinking water every day, at an affordable price, is a basic human right. To make sure we offer the best possible service, and that our long-term plans invest in the areas that matter most to customers, we need to have an ongoing conversation with our customers. We have an ongoing customer engagement and feedback programme, offering different ways for our customers to tell us what they think of our service and where we need to be better or do things differently, and to take into account people’s different situations and needs.
To do this, we work with several carefully selected research partners, who we can trust to deliver our engagement programme in a professional and secure manner.
This page will help you be confident that, if our research partners do ever contact you on our behalf, it is a genuine request for feedback.
If you do have any concerns about why you are being contacted, then do please get in touch with our team and they can provide guidance.
The difference between marketing communications and research/feedback requests
Please do remember that marketing communications are different to requests customers may receive to take part in market research, feedback and surveys. Therefore, while you may have previously opted out from receiving marketing communications about products and services we offer customers, in our privacy policy, we make it clear that we retain the right to send customers' requests to take part in our feedback programme, unless they have specifically opted out of receiving these requests. We aim to distinguish the content and footers of our messages to make this clear to you. For our opt-out rights, please see "How you can opt-out" below.
Information we will never ask you to provide
Our research partners, will NEVER ask you for the following information in any of our feedback surveys, unless it is for the reasons given below. If you are asked for these specific details, which go against what is detailed below, then you should end taking part and report it to our team:
- Your date of birth – please note in most surveys we will ask for your age
- Your unique Cambridge Water account number
- Your bank details (Our research partners will only ask for bank details if they are following up to make a thank you payment for taking part in a focus group, workshop or interview or for completing a survey. Our partners will also always offer you an alternative means of payment, such as cheque or voucher, if you do not wish to be paid by bank transfer.)
When taking part in any of our surveys or engagement, we need to collect information in order to be able to understand different people’s views to the questions asked. You will often be asked for all, or some, of the following details listed below. Remember, we will give you the choice in all our feedback surveys to choose not to answer any of these questions, or you can stop completing the survey at any time if you don’t feel comfortable:
- Age
- Gender
- Ethnicity/background
- What you do for a living/if you are retired
- Your household income
- Number of people living in your home
- Whether or not you have a water meter
- Your postcode (full or partial) – to make sure you are a customer or not
- Whether you are registered for our Priority Services Register
- Whether you receive a discounted tariff for your water bill
- Your contact details (typically your name, email and/or phone number).
- We do this so we can let you know if you have won a prize draw, or to send you a voucher, which we sometimes offer customers as a thank you for giving feedback.
- Our customer services team and/or our partners may also follow up on a request you might have made during the survey, such as wanting a call back to discuss a query. We will only do this if you give us explicit permission to do so through your feedback responses.
In our Privacy Policy we give details about our legitimate interest and other grounds for contacting you through our independent research partners and how we use your personal details.
How you can opt-out
You can opt-out of receiving any feedback requests from us at any time by informing the research partner who has contacted you, by contacting us using any of the methods described in our Contact us section below or by sending us a message directly using the form on our Contact us page. Once we have updated your account you, will no longer receive any more requests from us for feedback, unless you choose to opt back in by contacting us.
Who we work with
There are a number of ways we might get in touch with you to ask for your feedback and we really hope you do spend some time to give us your thoughts if you are contacted to take part.
Our partners hold any personal details they collect, on our behalf, securely and we audit them regularly (at least once a year) to ensure they have the right measures in place to keep your personal details safe for the period they hold them for.
Our ongoing monthly customer feedback programme covers the following:
H2Online Community
Feedback surveys following a contact with us
Feedback surveys about your service experience
Feedback surveys about what’s important to customers
Other customer feedback requests
The full list of our research partners is shown below:
- Accent Research (currently working in partnership with Roots Research Limited as part of its research team)
- Blue Marble Research
- Box Clever
- Community Research
- Explain Market Research
- Impact Research
- Qa Research
- Turquoise Thinking
Feedback requests from the water company regulator
Other organisations, such as the Consumer Council for Water, also contact customers on a regular basis to ask for feedback about how we are performing or to discuss a topic about water services.
Last updated: 2 August 2023