A question of priorities: Testing what customers want most from their water company
Having a clear understanding of customers’ priorities for their water and sewerage services is important for CCW, to ensure that we can represent them effectively.
In the water sector, companies must understand how consumers prioritise different aspects of water and sewerage services. These consumer priorities help shape business plans, ensuring they reflect what matters most to the people they serve.
This research has looked at the way customers are typically asked for their views on what their priorities are, and sought to identify the most effective way of allowing customers to provide a meaningful response, as well as any barriers that may prevent them from doing so.
By testing customer responses to a series of potential company priority statements, this research offers some suggestions about how best to ask customers about priorities, with some potential ways in which to improve accessibility – and thereby drive customer engagement.
CCW will use this alongside our other research into customer engagement to help develop our research, and our recommendations for the industry, in the future.
Some key findings:
- Consumer engagement with water priorities is extremely limited and constrained to those aspects which are most tangible and immediate (such as access to clean water and low bills).
- Responses to the tested question are limited to correlate with a consumer level of understanding, which is typically minimal.
- There are widely varying levels of understanding about what different priority areas mean in practice – while some are easily understood, customers may interpret the meaning behind the priority in a different way. Providing additional context and explanation is likely to be important to help enable customers to fully grasp what they are being asked.
- When it comes to testing priorities in customer research, effective question composition is essential for ensuring full comprehension and understanding, for instance by not testing too many statements at once and keeping the focus on immediate impact rather than the more abstract long-term picture.