Helping customers at Hafren Dyfrdwy At our Welsh water and waste-water company, Hafren Dyfrdwy, we have a separate target of helping, by 2025, 73% of those who have difficulty paying their bills, and eventually all customers who find bills unaffordable. We’re now supporting 35% of customers struggling to pay their bills and have been working closely with Welsh Government, the Consumer Council for Wales and stakeholders such as Dwr Cymru to understand what additional support we can offer. Working with Wrexham and Powys Councils Through a new relationship with our local councils, we’ve installed debt advisers who sign residents up to our schemes there, instead of them having to come directly to us. And while they’re talking to us about water debt, we can refer them to a Wrexham or Powys adviser who can look at all their finances. North Wales Resilience Forum We’ve been working with our Local Resilience Forum (a multi-agency partnership set up to help respond to emergencies), as well as with Wrexham and Powys Councils, to look at growing the number of customers on our priority services register. This is helping us gather more accurate customer data, so if there’s an unplanned supply interruption, we can contact the people who need support – they don’t have to contact us. Getting back to face-to-face contact, too As soon as the restrictions allow, we’ll be setting up events in local communities – such as fortnightly drop-ins and ‘cafés’ where customers can come along and ask questions. Through these, we want to build awareness among our customers about how we can help them. How we’re improving the accessibility of our service We want to identify customers with additional needs, and make sure they have the right support, especially if their water supply is interrupted. For some of our customers, a medical condition, disability or additional need can add to the difficulty if there’s a problem with their water supply. They might rely on high or constant water use (such as those on home dialysis), or may even struggle to access our service generally. Whatever their circumstances, they can join our Priority Services Register (‘PSR’), a list of customers who qualify for extra support during a supply interruption. Why giving priority to some customers is so important As well as needing help if the water supply is interrupted, many of the customers on our PSR require other forms of support to use our service at any time – and we see it as our responsibility to ensure they receive them. For example, they might need to nominate someone to speak to us on their behalf or, if we’re calling at their home, they might simply need more time to answer the door. Working closely with PSR customers and experts like St John Ambulance and Guide Dogs for the Blind, we’ve designed our services for a range of scenarios. Increasing the numbers we help Since last year’s report, we’ve been able to identify many more people who need our help, and doubled the size of our PSR from around 50,000 customers to over 100,000. This is due largely to the emails we sent out at the start of the pandemic, informing customers of how we were responding and offering enhanced support. Raising awareness of the PSR, this encouraged many people to put themselves – or family members or friends – forward for registration. Of our billable customers, 2.6% have now joined the PSR. Once registered for two years, they have to re-consent or leave – and our target last year was to attempt to contact 45% of the customers in this group, and to actually reach 17.5% of them. We’ve exceeded both of these targets, again helping to grow the numbers on our PSR. There’s still a lot more to do Although we’ve made good progress, we still need to get more people onto our PSR. Our goal is for 9.7% of our customers to be on it by 2025 – higher than the 7% target Ofwat set for us. Reaching this means finding out more about our customers, even though we simply serve everyone in our region, and don’t have contracts with individuals. So we need to find new ways to identify vulnerable customers. The Covid-related emails mentioned above were highly effective, and we’re also teaming up with local authorities, social housing groups and organisations such as the Citizens’ Advice Bureau to spread the word about the register, and about other support available from Severn Trent. Making communication easier, for more people Our rapid development of digital channels As technology advances, we’re keeping pace, to ensure our customers can deal with us in the ways that suit them best. We’ve always wanted to make contacting us as easy as possible. That’s how customers can make the most of our services, and tell us where any improvements are needed. And if they prefer to do that digitally, it’s up to us to make it happen. We’ve found digital channels are particularly important for customers who want to discuss difficult personal circumstances – such as those who have additional needs, experiencing bereavement, social anxieties or who struggle to pay their bills. Reducing reliance on our call centres At the start of the pandemic, concern about the risk of a Covid outbreak at one of our call centres really focused our minds on offering customers more communications channels. If phoning us was to become more difficult, they would need a range of options for getting in touch. So we accelerated our work on developing WhatsApp, two-way SMS, web messaging and Apple Chat, as well as our social media channels. We’ve seen a big surge in customers taking these digital routes, and received positive comments on how useful they are. Dealing with queries more efficiently One particular benefit of communicating digitally is customers can send us photos when they’re reporting a problem – whether it’s a leak or part of a bill they don’t understand. This helps us deal with the issue much more efficiently. Also, our virtual assistant Juno provides an answer to around 18% of queries without any human interaction. This saves time for our customers and for us, letting our teams focus on dealing with more complex or sensitive issues. We’ve developed the functionality of our website. Our ‘self-serve’ strategy has made reporting problems and resolving queries much quicker, without having to speak to anyone. Around 70% of all contacts now go through the website. My query was never abandoned and passed on from one rep onto another rep. This is the best customer service I have received across a multitude of companies in the past 12 months. I was left feeling valued, listened to and that I had been helped by Severn Trent Water. Fantastic service. ” “ Response from a customer who called and chose to complete the query in Whatsapp Supporting the region Standing by our vulnerable customers continued