Improving complaints handling at a water utility

The challenge

A regional water company serving 2.3 million customers had watched written complaints rise for two years. It was slipping down the industry's published comparison tables, and the regulator's incentive measures meant that every complaint had a direct financial cost as well as a reputational one.

Complaints took an average of 19 working days to resolve. More than one in five went on to a second stage, and each escalation cost several times as much to handle as the first. A central complaints team of 45 people handled every case; frontline advisers were told to log complaints and pass them on.

The customer services director asked us to help reduce complaint volumes and speed up resolution without adding staff.

What we did

We started with 600 closed complaints, read in full by a joint team of Halveron consultants and complaints handlers. We recorded the cause of each complaint, not its category, and the number of times the customer had contacted the company before complaining.

Three findings shaped the work. First, 58% of complaints followed at least two earlier contacts about the same problem: customers complained because nothing had happened, not because something had gone wrong once. Second, four causes accounted for more than half of all complaints: estimated bills after missed meter readings, unclear payment-plan letters, missed appointments for leak repairs and delays in refunds. Third, most complaints could have been resolved by the first person the customer spoke to, if that person had been allowed to.

With the company's teams we then:

• Gave frontline advisers authority to resolve. Advisers can now put things right on the call, including goodwill payments of up to £100, with simple guidance and a weekly review rather than prior approval.
• Moved complaints handlers closer to the causes. The central team was reorganised around the four main causes, each working directly with the billing, metering or field operations team responsible.
• Ran a weekly root-cause review. A thirty-minute meeting of operations managers reviews the week's complaints and agrees one fix, with an owner and a date.
• Rewrote the letters. We rewrote the eight letters that generated most contact, testing each with customers before it went live.

The result

Over the following twelve months, the company reported:

The central complaints team is now 32 people. The other 13 moved into frontline and field-scheduling roles as vacancies arose, with no redundancies.

“Our advisers always knew how to fix most of these. We had simply never let them.”

Customer Services Director, the water company