Company in hot water with regulators over customer complaints

SOUTHERN Water has been named by industry regulators as one of the worst for the way it deals with customer complaints.

The Consumer Council for Water (CCW) revealed the findings in its latest annual household customer complaint handling report, which compares the performance of water companies in England and Wales across a series of measures.

Southern Water and Thames Water were the only two suppliers to perform poorly across all eight comparative measures.

The report showed that complaints made in writing by customers of all the water companies increased by almost 10,000 between 2019 and 2020, which is a 13% rise.

Across the industry problems with bills – including disputes over how much water a household has used and the recovery of debt – continued to cause customers the biggest headache, accounting for almost two thirds of complaints.

CCW said it was “disappointed” to see Southern Water lose some of the good progress it had previously made after a 22% increase in written complaints. The company also lagged behind the rest of the industry when it came to resolving complaints at the earliest stage of the process.

CCW’s chief executive Emma Clancy has written to the company calling for an urgent improvement and has offered to support its efforts to tackle the causes of the poor performance.

She said: “Consumers’ expectations of their water company are very simple – they want accurate, affordable bills and a service they can always rely on, but some suppliers

are still not getting the basics right.

“It’s encouraging most of the industry is heading in the right direction but we want to see a big reduction in the large number of disputes over bills which still cause many customers enormous frustration, as well as resolving more complaints at the first time of asking.”

CCW has helped to resolve more than 6,700 complaints from aggrieved households and returned almost £1.5m in financial redress.

A Southern Water spokesperson told the A&T: “We fully recognise that we need to improve the service we deliver to our customers, reducing their need to contact us and complain.

“Our Customer Service Improvement Programme, launched in April 2020, will deliver a better experience to our customers across a number of areas. Since then we’ve seen a reduction in written billing complaints by 18%.

“We’re also using insight into our complaints to ensure we’re focusing on the changes our customers want to see and are fully committed to improving our position.”