Keeping hold of that customer service badge of honour

At Welsh Water we work hard each and every day to earn the trust of our customers and we do this by not only providing them with a safe and reliable water and wastewater service, but also by providing them with a first class customer service.  And so we were delighted to find out this week that our focus on customer service has been recognised in us retaining our ‘Service Mark’ accreditation.

ServiceMark is a national standard which independently recognises an organisation’s achievement in customer service and its commitment to upholding those standards.  We were first awarded the accreditation back in 2018 and following a rigorous re-evaluation process involving customers and colleagues, we are delighted to know that we will retain this status through until 2024.

ServiceMark is awarded based on customer feedback and an assessment of employee engagement with an organisation’s customer service strategy. It helps organisations understand the effectiveness of their strategy and identifies any areas for improvement.

Undergoing ServiceMark accreditation is an opportunity for organisations – of all sizes and sectors – to demonstrate the high quality of their customer service.  The first stage involved a survey of over 2,000 colleagues about how they thought the company manage customer service.  The benchmark score for achieving accreditation in this area is 70 and we were pleased to see that we scored 81, which was up on our score of 74 in 2018.

The next crucial stage in the process is for customers to be asked about their views on our customer service.  Here again the company performed well scoring 79.2 against a benchmark score of 70.  This is something we are particularly proud of particularly as it has been achieved against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic so shows we’ve not allowed that to detract from our focus serving our customers.

While we are naturally pleased to have achieved the accreditation, we know that we can’t rest on our laurels because customer expectations continue to increase. We need to make sure we are constantly working hard to achieve and exceed these expectations.  That is why we already have plans in place to improve things further which will include implementing more digital capability such as self service, better tracking for customer jobs, and enhancing the customer culture within the organisation to ensure we always do the right thing for customers.

Maintaining the standard has been a great achievement for the company and a testament to all our colleagues that work around the clock for our customers.  The challenge now is to make sure that we keep hold of our standards into the future.