July 10, 2023
innovation-in-water-challenge winnersLed by: Severn Trent Water
Partners: Consumer Council for Water (CCW), South East Water Ltd, Thames Water Ltd and United Utilities.
Competition: Innovation in Water Challenge
Funding awarded: £214,901
Customers are a vital part of the water sector, but currently not all customers’ needs are met by traditional communication methods. The aftermath of Covid-19 rising energy and fuel prices, and the cost-of-living crisis, are resulting in increasing numbers of vulnerable customers – someone who requires a more tailored experience in their customer communications. Hard-to-reach customers are a subset of vulnerable customers. These are people who, due to individual circumstances such as disabilities, would benefit from alternative communication methods.
Extreme weather events such as long summer droughts highlight the need to improve water company interactions with these vulnerable customers. Without adequate insight of their needs, the water sector risk delivering the wrong level of support.
The Vulnerable Customers project, led by Severn Trent Water, used behavioural science to understand more about the water sector’s consumers in order to deliver tailored communication. The project, funded by the Ofwat Innovation Fund, aimed to understand consumer engagement needs and re-engage consumers as trusted sources of information. The project involved conducting research to test how campaigns can be directed to those most in need.
The project ran in four phases:
1. Discover – Looking at trends based on analysis of vulnerable customer reports from other utility companies, interviewing colleagues and working with partners to interview vulnerable customers in the pilot area.
2. Define - developing insights and identifying key themes in reaching the most vulnerable customers and creating problem statements and agreed ambitions.
3. Develop – hosting workshops that explored what could change and agreeing key ideas for each problem.
4. Deliver – testing the project in the community to see if better engagement could be established.
The project found that in the case of communications that needed immediate action, for example, issuing notices about risk of water contamination, standard communication channels such as social media weren’t reaching vulnerable customers. In these instances, other communication channels need to be adopted, such as sharing information via community leaders or non-English language radio stations.
The project led to the creation of a Playbook in which the team shared all insights, so that other water companies can benefit in future.
“Through this human-centred, iterative approach to innovation, we have a better understanding of the needs of hard-to-reach, vulnerable customers, their circumstances, and the most effective ways to communicate with them. With this, we can build greater connections and trust, so that fewer customers are hard to reach.
“It meant that we were able to have a laser focus on the people we are designing the solutions for, ultimately leading to better products, services, processes and outcomes for vulnerable customers.”
Severn Trent is now hoping to develop the project with more partners and experiment with the best ways to contact a diverse range of hard-to-reach, vulnerable customers. A new project, Innovation in the Community, will take learnings from the Vulnerable Customers project, engaging with mobility cold spots and deprived areas in order to offer people in those areas the opportunity to learn new skills, while inviting them to solve challenges using their creativity and local knowledge.
This case study was featured in the Ofwat Innovation Fund 2023 Annual Report – read more:
