Chair's Initial Thoughts (Report Highlights From The 2025 Conference)

A clear strength across all of the presentations was the way speakers collectively traced the evolution of customer trust through building more trust through transparency, clearer expectation-setting, and more human service design. 

Exploring trust building specifically within capital delivery projects, customer leakage, smart metering, data-driven communications, and behaviour-change interventions. The tone was refreshingly balanced as there was genuine recognition of progress without downplaying the challenges that remain. 

What stood out most was the shift toward a more human understanding of customer behaviour. There is now far less assumption that customers will act rationally, and far more design work centred on how customer actually behave, especially in high pressure situations.

This is evident in everything from acting on leakage alerts and follow-up journeys to the way teams are approaching new smart-metering deployments. Interventions are increasingly shaped around real-world psychology rather than idealised models, and the early results in affordability support, engagement, complaints, and billing communication reflect that shift. 

The snapshot below captures some of the highlights from the discussions.  The full report, including transcribes from every Q&A session, presentation slides and future-facing strategic recommendations from the speakers is included in the post-conference report package

Theresa Malloy, Customer Insight Specialist at Watercare Services, New Zealand, effectively delivered a field report from inside one of the Pacific region's fastest-growing cities — a place where population growth, climate volatility, and ageing infrastructure now intersect daily operational reality. 

Watercare serves 1.7 million customers, oversees 475,000 meters, and faces rising consumption, low water literacy and increasing climate-related risk. Theresa’s team launched a major piece of customer research: a survey of 13,000 smart-meter households, achieving an unusually strong 10% response rate. This allowed her to overlay attitudinal responses with real usage data — a rare and powerful pairing in utility research.

What Theresa Drilled Into

1. Smart Meter Awareness Is Shockingly Low

42% of customers with a smart meter didn’t know they had one.
Many didn’t know what it did. Those who did understand the technology demonstrated 20% higher recognition of the benefits, from accurate billing to leak alerts.

2. Behaviour Change Is Real — But Only for Some

14% reported changing behaviour directly due to smart meter insight.
Usage analysis showed customers who actively engaged with the app used 7% less water — and frequent app users consumed 10% less than non-users.

3. Embedded Household Habits Are the Major Barrier

Daily routines — showers, laundry, kitchen use — happen on “autopilot”. Without strong “what’s in it for me?” messaging, customers lack motivation to shift behaviour.

4. Leak Alerts: Email Beats App Notifications

Despite the industry's obsession with real-time digital tools, customers still trust the humble email. App alerts were often ignored; email-triggered action.

Natasha Tuke, Head of Customer and External Communications, Anglian Water @oneAlliance Customer Team presentation traced how the @one Alliance at Anglian Water has deliberately shifted its capital delivery model from “engineers decide, then tell customers” to “design with customers from day one.”

Natasha began by setting the context: the @one Alliance delivers over £3bn of capital works for Anglian Water, with shared purpose, shared data, shared risk and shared reward across partner companies. Historically, even though the work was “planned investment”, decisions were engineering-led, late-stage, and only lightly informed by customer impact. Engagement often meant telling communities what was happening once designs were locked and traffic management agreed.

The new model puts community impact at every stage of the project lifecycle. Four dedicated customer specialists now sit inside project teams as “the voice of the customer,” starting at the solution-option stage, not at the road-closure letter stage. Their job is to ask: who are we impacting, how, and can we design out that pain?

This shows up in very tangible ways:

• Using a risk and opportunity model on every project: mapping highways, amenities, schools, businesses, sensitivities and events.
• Asking not just “how do we mitigate?” but also “where are the opportunities?” – for example, turning a disruptive scheme near a local event into a chance to educate the community and show how their money is being invested.
• Challenging designs: one scheme avoided ~£200,000 in potential business loss by revisiting modelling and changing road closures once the community impact was properly surfaced.

The results are significant:

• Around 17,000 customers directly impacted so far this year, plus wider reach via digital channels.
• 29 positive media articles generated from planned works – rare in today’s water sector.
• Shadow C-MeX satisfaction consistently above 80 over five years (from ~80% to 94% of staff saying customer focus is important).
• Over 500 lives positively impacted via volunteering and community projects linked to capital works.

Mumin Islam, Head of Innovation, South Staffs & Cambridge Water 

Mumin  started with the macro picture:

• A projected 5 billion litre per day deficit by 2055 if the UK doesn’t change course.
• A third of the solution must come from reduced consumption and water efficiency, which means behaviour change, not just engineering.
• At the same time, trust in the sector is at a 13-year low, and many communities are sceptical not only of water companies but of institutions generally.

From Mumin’s perspective, rebuilding trust hinges on:

• Understanding before being understood – genuinely learning beliefs, rituals and daily practices.
• Using credible, local messengers, not just corporate logos.
• Taking time – accepting that sceptical communities won’t trust after one workshop.
• Aligning with values already present in faith and culture (e.g. stewardship, avoiding waste).
• Showing up consistently, not just for a single pilot.

What “good” looks like

• Communities who once asked “What’s your hidden agenda?” now invite the utility back.
• Faith and community leaders proactively front campaigns with the company in the background.
• Water efficiency and smart metering messages feel authentic, not performative.
• Vulnerable or historically marginalised groups see tangible benefits, not just messaging.
• These  practices are built into BAU engagement plans, not dependent on one      enthusiastic project lead.

James Walker — Director, Dispute Resolution Ombudsman drew lessons from 12 sectors including telecoms, aviation, energy and retail. He stressed that water utilities receive fewer complaints than switchable markets — but the complaints they do receive are far more complex. He argued that profitability and trust are directly linked to how well companies resolve issues, and customers benchmark water utilities against Amazon, not industry peers.

James showed that “effort” matters more than speed: fast acknowledgements are important, but overly fast resolutions feel shallow and reduce satisfaction. Authenticity — explaining what went wrong and why — dramatically cuts escalation, as seen when comparing Virgin’s detailed responses with budget airlines’ generic ones.

He also explained behavioural cues: serious issues are typed on laptops, not phones; more typos indicate higher emotional arousal. Dividing complaints into “what happened, impact, desired outcome” helps customers think more clearly and enables better resolution.

James’ message: unless water companies show more effort than the customer had to make, trust will continue to erode. Transparency, human explanations and proactive updates are the strongest tools to rebuild confidence.

Sukhvinder Kaur-Stubbs, Chair, Independent Customer Challenge Group, Thames Water 

Sukhvinder Kaur-Stubbs brought the room back to first principles: honesty, transparency, and fixing problems before they get worse. She began with a story from her time as a board member at Severn Trent Water two decades ago:

A customer told her: “I don’t expect perfection. I expect honesty, and I expect you to fix things before they get worse.”
 

Those words, she argued, are sharper today than ever.

Actionable takeaways 

· Customers don’t expect perfection — they expect honesty, especially during failure

· Scrutiny must be meaningful, independent, and connected to real customer outcomes, not a 

   compliance tick-box.

· Understanding diverse needs is core to service design, not an add-on

· Vulnerable customers experience trust differently — promises broken to them have 

   disproportionate consequences

· Companies must show visible progress, not just commitments — “fix it before it gets worse

TRUST BREAKPOINTS — WHERE TRUST ACTUALLY FRACTURES 

These are the exact moments that destroy trust, based directly on what she described.

1. When the customer sees spills before the company explains them

Citizen drones, WhatsApp groups, river monitoring — the visibility is now instant, while the company remains slow.

2. When the customer hears one thing from the call centre and another from the field technician

Her “for once, you sound like one company” story is the oldest — and truest — trust mechanic in utilities.

3. When bill increases arrive without a narrative customers understand

The story isn’t: “Here’s the investment plan.”

The story is:

 “Here’s what your bill is preventing — future droughts, basement floods, sewer failures, environmental decline.”

4. When complexity is invisible to customers but consequences land on them

Regulatory cycles, asset constraints, capex planning — none of that matters when water doesn’t flow at 7am.

Alison Thompson, Independent Co-Chair, Customer & Environmental Scrutiny Panel, SES Water brought a long-term, resilience-first, security-of-supply lens to the trust debate — and her intervention reframed the conversation around the fundamental national risk: the UK is sleepwalking into water stress, and the public has no idea.

Trust in water cannot be treated like a one-off reputational cycle. Last year’s drought “was tough”, but it should be understood as a warning shot. Climate change will make acute incidents more frequent and more compound.

Customers do not know:

• how  close the UK is to systemic water scarcity
• what drought risk really means for them
• that high water users (not “average users”) drive disproportionate strain
• that business consumption patterns are critical to the system
• that climate, population, and infrastructure fragility are converging

Alison’s point: awareness is not a nice-to-have — it is a structural weakness in the resilience system.

Gary Adams, Head of Metering Operations, Northumbrian Water presentation is essentially: how to rebuild trust and shift behaviour in a low-trust, high-investment era by getting out of the call centre and onto the village green.

With £3.6bn of investment and trust at record lows, Gary argued that behaviour change doesn’t come from meters – it comes from people. Northumbrian has therefore built three community-facing capabilities: Customer Heroes(volunteer staff at local events), Community Engagement Vehicles and Ambassadors (branded vans plus full-time outreach staff), and Local Action Groups (hyper-local forums with councillors, MPs and community leaders).

These teams are trained in an EQ + IQ model: empathy and emotional recognition coupled with robust facts on the contentious issues: storm overflows, bills, dividends, CEO pay and meter roll-out. Since April, they’ve run over 229 events, 7,500+ meaningful interactions and started ~2,000 support processes, with consistent 10/10 experience scores.

Case studies from a village resisting smart metering poles and from disruptive burst-main incidents underlined the point: when the vans show up early, listen properly and co-design solutions, resistance softens and anxiety falls. Looking ahead, Gary warned that the real risk is over-promising speed; honest timelines plus visible local action will define whether trust holds or fractures again.

Dr Armenak Antinyan, Head of Behavioural Economics, Thames Water.

In a presentation that blended psychology, economics, and very pragmatic utility challenges, Dr Antinyan, argued that water companies cannot meet their 2030–2050 obligations unless they fully internalise a truth behavioural scientists have known for years: most customer decisions are not rational, linear or carefully weighed. They come from the “lazy” part of the brain – 

System 1 – that is emotional, biased, intuitive and frequently irrational.

He began by offering a light-hearted comparison: “Think of two customers – one rational, one ordinary.”The rational one immediately sees a leak, does the maths, and rushes to fix it. The ordinary one goes into avoidance mode, procrastinates, and quietly hopes the problem resolves itself. The point was clear: designing customer interventions for rational behaviour is a design flaw—because the overwhelming majority of customers are not behaving in a System 2 way.

Addressing one of the biggest misconceptions: that scaling behavioural science simply requires producing more nudges. In reality, the blockers lie in culture, outdated systems, fear of experimentation, aversion to failure, and organisation-wide cognitive biases. Until utilities embrace iterative testing and data-backed decision-making, he argued, they will continue designing for imaginary rational customers—rather than the real ones whose decisions actually determine demand management success.

Sarah Castelvecchi, Consumption and Behaviour Change Lead, Anglian Water

lifted the lid on a deceptively simple truth: customer-side leakage is now one of the most behaviourally complex journeys in the water sector. 

The presentation unfolded like a forensic investigation into why hidden, low-flow leaks (the infamous P4 leaks) persist — and how Anglian Water is learning to shape behaviour at scale using smart meter data, behavioural insights and a practical dose of digital creativity.

Sarah began with the macro challenge: Anglian faces a 600 ML/day supply–demand deficit by 2050. Smart metering is the foundational tool — with 2.2 million households due to receive hourly reads by 2032— but “visibility is only step one.” What matters next is intent and action.

Enter the problem:

 82% of all leaks detected via smart meters are P4 leaks(1–7.5 litres/hour).
Individually small, collectively vast.

50,000+ of them have been running for up to two years.

Sarah explained that while 90% of high-priority leaks get fixed quickly, P4 leaks fall into a behavioural blind spot: they don’t feel urgent, customers underestimate their bill impact, and many assume they require invasive plumbing work. Smart meter alerts alone weren’t shifting enough behaviour.

So the team reframed the entire journey. They conducted data deep dives, mapped behavioural frictions, and applied the COM-B model: capability (can customers diagnose or fix it?), opportunity (is guidance accessible?), and motivation (do they believe it’s worth addressing?). They found clear barriers: emotional stress when hearing the word “leak,” confusion over what’s visible vs invisible, and a mismatch between operational language and customer reality.

The solution was practical:

• A  suite of “find and fix” YouTube videos fronted by a credible plumber-influencer ("James")
• A  redesigned email journey using      behavioural cues, reframed language (“drips and trickles,” not “leaks”),and sequential nudges
• Scripts and content aligned with behavioural friction points
• A "destination hub” for self-serve diagnostics

And it worked.

 21% of long-running P4 leaks were fixed within 25 days in the first trial.
28% in the second.

The remaining speakers, presentations panels and analysis are all available in the post-conference report package available for download today.

Steve Thomas, Chair, SERG