SIM scores can take priority over customer service, warns NI Water

Water companies could start to develop business plans to score well against the service incentive mechanism (SIM) rather than to achieve good outcomes for customers, Northern Ireland Water has warned.

Speaking in a panel discussion at Utility Week Congress in Birmingham yesterday, Northern Ireland Water’s customer service director Liam Mulholland said the service incentive mechanism (SIM) introduced to drive customer service levels in the water industry was having unintended consequences.

He said: “It created a world, if you like, of computer game cheats which asks when is a contact not a contact? When is a complaint not a complaint? And how does that impact my score?”

Mulholland said he “doubted” whether building a business plan to satisfy SIM would “build trust” with customers.

“I think you need to go back and think about it and say, there is a different way into that. The key thing I want to get to by doing all the surveys and the engagement and the focus groups is actual data, something that actually tells me what is going wrong, what I can do to fix it next time that can change the brand.”

Mulholland was agreeing with Thames Water’s chief customer officer, Andrew Reaney, who said the “size of the penalties and incentives can deliver the wrong behaviours”.

Reaney said: “You can look to pass the exam and manage the [assessment] week. You can do that if you have the capacity. I think that can deliver the wrong behaviours and that won’t be a good thing for customers.”

Reaney said SIM has had the “desired outcome, but it’s a fairly blunt instrument and it’s a fairly difficult instrument to manage, especially when you’ve got so many contacts as Thames has”.

The Institute of Customer Service’s chief executive, Jo Causon, also speaking at the event, said business should be improving their customer service because “it’s the right thing to do”.

“If we are doing this as a tick box exercise to serve a regulator than I do not think that is the right thing to do. I don’t think that will have the right outcome for the business the customer or the industry.

“Wouldn’t it be great to have a world where we don’t need regulation, because we are doing the right things in order to deliver good business and good customer outcomes?

“I often think customer service is late to the table because people have viewed customer service as a pink and fluffy subject area. It is anything but. It is about business rationale that we put on the table consistently, and make sure that the board really understands that.”