Written complaints assessments overview 2018-19

A significant area of our work involves complaints which we involves:

• Customers who complaint to us about their water company; and
• Complaint information reported by companies where we identify areas of concern and raise with the companies what they are doing to address their service issues.

Written complaint assessments complement this work. We visit companies, review a sample of written complaints, make recommendations and share good practice with the rest of the industry.

Our assessments review:

• whether the company has adhered to its own complaint procedure;
• the quality of the company responses and whether it has addressed the customer’s concerns and signposted to the next stage; and
• if the company has dealt with the complaint within its own or regulatory timescale.

This report is an overview of the written complaint assessments we carried out in 2018/19.

In the previous year, most companies performed quite well on written complaints with only four reporting an increase on the previous year. Two of these were single figure percentage increases.