Putting the Customer First – Establishing a Customer Panel at Wellington Water

Annual Conference

‘Putting the customer at the heart of the business’ is one of council-owned Wellington Water’s main strategic directions for several reasons. A solid customer service relationship drives performance improvements, as the organisation better understands what customers want and how to deliver that effectively. Secondly, best practice asset management demands that managers have a good understanding of the context in which they are recommending or setting service levels, including the expectations of their external stakeholders. Customers make up the largest group of stakeholders for a water utility. Thirdly, direct relationships build trust. Trust is a key factor in being able to influence the behaviour of others; it is particularly important to the success of community education programmes such as voluntarily reducing water use or storing water for emergencies. Other factors include technological change and regulatory requirements.

Yet, Wellington Water does not have a direct relationship with customers in a commercial sense. The region’s residents pay for water services by way of property rates, and customers’ first point of contact when calling with queries about water services is typically their city council contact centre.

On considering how other utilities approached the question of improving their customer engagement, the agency of a panel was noted. This paper considers why customer engagement has become more important even to monopoly utility companies, why customer panels are now more common as a way to engage, and Wellington Water’s experiences in establishing and recruiting a panel.

Conference Papers

11.30 Putting The Customer First Establishing A Customer Panel Within Wellington Water.pdf

pdf
936 KB
10 Nov 2017

11.30am A Van Paassen.pdf

pdf
1020 KB
10 Nov 2017