From insight to impact: Principles for Customer Involvement and evidence-based decision making
Introduction
Water companies make decisions that directly affect customers’ bills, services, and the environment. To rebuild trust and legitimacy, these decisions should be informed by robust evidence and shaped by the people they affect.
Companies should draw on multiple sources of customer and public insight when making decisions. These include:
- Customer research, which provides structured, representative evidence on customer priorities, preferences, trade-offs, and affordability. Some methods are designed to be representative of the wider customer base, while others provide deeper insight into customer experiences and decision making.
- Public participation, which enables people to actively shape decisions through dialogue and involvement.
- Operational customer insight, which provides continuous evidence of customer experience through complaints, customer contacts, customer survey feedback, service performance data, satisfaction measures, and behavioural evidence. It helps companies understand emerging issues, monitor performance, and evaluate whether decisions are delivering intended outcomes.
Including non-household customers
In England, the existence of a competitive retail market does not remove the need for wholesale water companies to understand and involve non-household customers where wholesale company decisions may materially affect them.
Companies should work with retailers and other representative bodies where appropriate but remain responsible for ensuring that the views of non-household customers are understood and considered in decision-making.
Water companies should not assume that retailers alone can provide sufficient insight into the needs and priorities of non-household customers. Wholesalers remain responsible for ensuring that decisions affecting non-household customers are informed by appropriate evidence and engagement.
Context of Ofwat’s Customer Involvement Rule
CCW’s principles complement, but do not replace Ofwat’s Customer Involvement in Decision Making Rule and supporting guidance when demonstrating compliance.
Using customer research and public participation
Customer research
Customer research generates structured evidence to inform company decisions.
Methods include:
- Surveys
- Deliberative research
- Customer panels
- Willingness-to-pay and acceptability testing
- Focus groups
It helps companies understand:
- Customer priorities
- Acceptable trade-offs
- The role of trust and satisfaction
- The impact of affordability and vulnerability (and mitigations)
- Differences across customer groups
Research should clearly identify customer segments i.e. groups who may experience or respond to the impact of decisions differently (e.g. by demographics, income, vulnerability, behaviours, or attitudes). This can reveal how various aspects of a person’s identity combine to shape their experiences and outcomes.
Segmentation should help companies understand where priorities, needs, affordability, and impacts differ across customer groups so that decisions reflect those differences where appropriate.
Public participation (events and projects)
Public participation goes beyond research by giving people an active role in shaping decisions through dialogue.
Examples include:
- Citizens’ juries and deliberative forums: Representative groups explore and shape decisions over time.
- Participatory workshops and co-design: People test options or help design solutions from the outset.
- Community partnerships and catchment groups: Ongoing collaboration with local communities, often place-based.
- Local stewardship arrangements: Long-term community involvement in delivery, monitoring, and improvement.
- Citizen science: Public contribution to data collection and analysis.
Public participation enables people to:
- Influence decisions directly
- Deliberate on complex issues
- Share ownership of outcomes
- Stay involved through implementation
- Inform participants by sharing views and experiences from a wider range of society i.e. understanding impacts beyond the individual.
Participation may include research elements, but differs in its purpose, visibility of influence, and potential for ongoing involvement.
The approaches listed are not exhaustive. Companies should treat them as guidance and adopt innovative methods where appropriate, including digital, partnership-based, or locally tailored approaches. All approaches should meet core principles, particularly inclusivity, transparency, and clear influence on decisions.
The eight guiding principles
The following principles underpin all engagement.
Customer involvement should focus on decisions where customer evidence is most likely to improve decision-making and strengthen legitimacy.
Companies should prioritise involvement where decisions are likely to have a material impact on:
- customers’ bills and affordability;
- service quality and resilience;
- environmental outcomes;
- long-term investment;
- trust and confidence in the company.
A material decision is one that could reasonably affect customers’ experience, costs, or outcomes, or where there is significant public interest or uncertainty.
Companies should explain why they considered a decision to be material, how the level of customer involvement was proportionate to its significance, and how customer evidence influenced the final decision.
Companies should maintain an ongoing understanding of customer and community views rather than relying solely on periodic engagement exercises.
Customer and public insight should be gathered continuously through:
- customer research;
- operational customer feedback;
- complaints and contacts;
- customer satisfaction measures;
- participation activities; and
- wider behavioural and service evidence.
The level of customer engagement should be proportionate to the significance of the decision.
More extensive customer research and public participation are expected where decisions involve:
- significant bill impacts;
- major changes to service levels;
- environmental consequences;
- long-term investment commitments;
- impacts on vulnerable customers; or
- issues likely to attract substantial public interest.
Less significant operational decisions may require lighter-touch approaches.
Companies should:
- clearly explain how their engagement approach is proportionate to the decision, including why particular methods were selected and how they reflect the scale and impact of the issue;
- select engagement methods that reflect the scale, complexity, and impact of the decision; and
- use both customer research and public participation for material decisions.
- be transparent about how research topics and questions are selected and developed2;
- ensure materials are clear, balanced, and reflect real-world choices;
- present trade-offs, including impacts on bills and service levels; and
- demonstrate that research design supports robust and reliable findings.
Engagement should be designed and delivered to high professional standards. In this context, companies should:
- ensure research and participation are balanced, unbiased, and non-leading;
- use appropriate sampling and recruitment methods to generate reliable evidence;
- provide sufficient context for participants to understand trade-offs; and
- work with suitably qualified and experienced research agencies, applying recognised industry standards and best practice.
Engagement should reflect all relevant customer groups, including customers in vulnerable circumstances, future customers, and non-household customers.
Companies should consider whether different customer groups experience the impacts of decisions differently and ensure that these perspectives are reflected in decision-making.
Companies should explain:
- what is in scope;
- how much influence participants have; and
- how input will be used.
Companies should not rely on a single source of evidence when making significant decisions.
They should demonstrate how they have considered and weighted different forms of evidence, including:
- customer research;
- operational customer insight;
- complaints and service data;
- public participation;
- behavioural evidence; and
- wider sector evidence where relevant.
Where different sources point to different conclusions, companies should explain how they reached their final decision.
Companies remain responsible for the quality and integrity of their customer evidence.
Assurance should be proportionate to the significance of the decision and the role that customer evidence plays in informing it.
Independent assurance may be provided through:
- professional research agencies;
- independent technical reviewers;
- expert peer review; or
- other suitably qualified independent specialists.
Assurance should consider whether engagement was:
- robust;
- balanced;
- inclusive;
- transparent; and
- appropriately reflected in decision-making.
The objective is not assurance for its own sake, but confidence that evidence has been gathered and used appropriately.
Customers and communities should be able to see how their views have been used.
Companies must demonstrate a clear line of sight between:
- what customers said;
- the options considered;
- the decisions taken; and
- what changed as a result
This should include:
- the decision being made and why it matters to customers;
- the engagement used and why it was appropriate;
- key findings from research and participation;
- how different customer groups are affected;
- the trade-offs considered; and
- how evidence influenced the final decision.
Companies should publish clear, accessible summaries showing how engagement has shaped decisions and their impacts.
Conclusion
Customer research and public participation are not ends in themselves. Their purpose is to ensure that decisions are evidence-based, transparent and shaped by customers.
This framework focuses on what companies should demonstrate, not just how engagement is carried out.
Strong customer involvement is not defined by the number of engagement activities undertaken. It is demonstrated through the quality of evidence gathered, the way different sources of insight are brought together, and the extent to which decisions are shaped by customer and community views.