Severn Trent deepens focus on technology

EXCLUSIVE: Severn Trent has said it will become “more technology-orientated”, to further improve its service to customers.

“We are looking to become more technology-orientated, in terms of keeping customers informed,” the company’s chief executive Liv Garfield told Utility Week. “We are going to make sure we do more in the technology space to make the experience stronger for customers if they do feel the need to contact us.”

In its financial results for the six months to September 2016, published yesterday (24 November), the company said it had made “good progress in its digital agenda” by implementing new digital services to help keep customers informed and improve efficiency.

However, the company said it still has “a lot of work to do” on customer service, and that improving its performance against Ofwat’s service incentive mechanism “continues to be a focus for the management team”.

In 2015/16, Severn Trent finished seventh of the eighteen water companies, and joint-third out of the 10 water and sewerage companies. Garfield told Utility Week this was “a reasonable performance”, but “not as good as we would like it to be for our customers”.

“We are very strong in the quantitative area, in terms of the experience customers receive every single day around complaints,” she said. “It is the qualitative performance where we do brilliantly sometimes, and not as good as we would like at other times. It is that variability that we’re looking to address.”

She said that, as well as increasing technology use, the company would build more resilience into its systems to be able to cope with variable changes of work volumes in the event of severe weather. It will also refine its processes to make them simpler and slicker.