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Thames Water has relocated its customer service call centre from South Africa to Swindon in a move to address “poor decision-making” as part of the company’s turnaround.
The move will see 200 jobs created in Swindon. So far under the eight-year plan implemented by chief executive Sarah Bentley, 550 new roles have been created and insourced to grow the company’s workforce by 7.5%.
“Our decision to insource essential roles is part of our efforts to address years of under-investment and poor decision-making that have hollowed out critical capabilities and left Thames Water unable to deliver for customers and the environment,” Bentley said.
“We believe a customer service team based in the region will make an immediate and significant impact in delivering high-quality service more reliably.”
Complaints from household customers have fallen 60% since the company embarked on its turnaround two years ago. Bentley identified customer service as one of the core pillars to improve together with the environment and operational management.
Thames said relocating the call centre team to the UK will allow the company to provide improved and more reliable customer service. The company ranked at the bottom of the sector’s customer measure of experience (C-Mex) score table for 2021 and 2022, despite driving complaints down by 43% last year.
Of the 550 positions created, 150 are skilled engineers to work on capital delivery projects and additional technicians working on driving down leakage. Thames now has more than 1,000 field technicians carrying out 1,300 repairs weekly.
Bentley said having dedicated engineering teams was key to accelerating the delivery of large-scale projects to modernise water and wastewater networks.
“We are taking these steps to rebuild our business in order to deliver on our turnaround plan” she said. “This will take time and significant investment, but we are committed to achieving this plan and ensuring our customers see and feel the progress we are making.”
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