Southern Water performs worst for customer service on Twitter

Northumbrian Water and Wessex Water also score badly, while Severn Trent comes out on top

Southern Water has been listed as the worst water and sewerage company when it comes to customer service on Twitter, followed by Northumbrian Water and Wessex Water.

In an Insight Series by Help Handles, Southern Water was shown to be the slowest company to respond to customers with a first response time of six hours and 15 minutes. The company was also the slowest on average with a five hour and 58-minute response time.

A spokesperson for Southern Water, said: “Our customers can contact us through a number of channels including Twitter, Facebook and via our online chat service or over the phone. We clearly display the hours our dedicated customer service team are available and offer a 24-hour emergency line for those who need us urgently.

“We have spent a lot of time developing our social media channels to better reflect the needs of our customers and will continue to work hard to improve our customer service and out of hours response times – while also making it easy for our customers to understand which channels we can best be contacted on during evenings and weekends.”

United Utilities had a first response time of three hours and 27 minutes and both Wessex Water and Northumbrian Water took more than two hours to provide a first response to customers.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale Thames Water and Severn Trent were the fastest to respond to customers with a 32-minute and 33-minute first response time respectively.

Similarly, Severn Trent (29 minutes) and Thames Water (30 minutes) maintained the fastest response on average.

Help Handles, which provides social customer service analytics for companies, scores firms out of 100 on its performance index across four metrics: inbound mention volumes; response rate, responses under 30 minutes and sentiment. Each metric accounts for 25 per cent.

During the last quarter (1 July to 26 September) the UK’s water and sewerage suppliers received 27,612 direct mentions to their help handles on Twitter.

Severn Trent ranked the best overall performer for customer service on Twitter, with the best aggregate score across the four metrics. It was followed by Anglian Water, Yorkshire Water and Scottish Water.

A spokesperson for Severn Trent, said: “We’re delighted to have come out on top of the rankings, and it’s a reflection of both our strong focus on customer service and also on all of the hard work the social media team put in to respond to queries or to just have a chat if that’s what our customers want.

“We’re always very aware that we can do better though as social media is becoming an ever more important way for customers to contact us, alongside email, webchat, or by phone or by letter.”

For inbound volume, Thames Water was the busiest company for customer service, receiving a total of 8,837 mentions on Twitter between July and September, while Wessex Water received the lowest with 546 mentions.

Scottish Water was the most responsive to customers answering 93 per cent of mentions to their Twitter handle. Together with Yorkshire Water, Severn Trent and Anglian Water they were the only companies to achieve a response rate of more than 50 per cent. Wessex Water was the worst performing, having only responded to 24 per cent of mentions.

Yorkshire Water and Thames Water had the highest percentage of mentions responded to in under 30 minutes, with both achieving 79 per cent, followed closely by Severn Trent, Scottish Water and Anglian Water.

For sentiment Anglian Water was the “outstanding” performer for the period with a score of +20 points among conversations with customers on Twitter. United Utilities and Thames Water scored the lowest for sentiment.

A spokesperson for Wessex Water, said: “Our customer service performance is the best in the industry, which is reflected in our leading position for SIM.

“Unfortunately, this survey is somewhat misleading as the social media metrics used favour those companies that get most mentions, so as a smaller water and sewerage company it is inevitable that we won’t be shown as a leading performer in a survey of this kind.

“The vast majority of our customers are happy with our service and rarely need to contact us through social media, which is another reason why the number of mentions are low for us. But when customers do contact us through social media they get a prompt response, out of hours and seven days a week.”

Richard Seales, customer manager at Northumbrian Water, added: “Customers are at the heart of what we do and providing unrivalled customer service is what we aim to deliver every time.

“We offer a range of ways that customers can contact us and are finding customers increasingly using these different methods, one of which is social media.

“Our social media presence has developed over recent years and we are committed to looking at ways of improving the service including the response time outside of current opening hours.”

In the Consumer Council for Water’s (CCWater) 11^th complaints report, released on 20 September, water companies in England and Wales received fewer than 100,000 written complaints in 2016/17, for the first time in more than 20 years.

However, it was offset by an increase of more than 40,000 in “unwanted contacts” to 2.14 million. CCWater said future reports will look at complaints through all channels, including social media.

Best Overall Performers for customer service on Twitter

1. Severn Trent
2. Anglian Water
3. Yorkshire Water

4. Scottish Water
5. Thames Water
6. Welsh Water
7. United Utilities

Worst Performers

8. Wessex Water
9. Northumbrian Water
10. Southern Water

Source: Help Handles