The problem

Wessex Water weren’t happy with being the best in their industry – they wanted to offer the best customer service in any industry.

Customers may be able to choose their water supplier in future, so Wessex Water want to stay ahead of the competition. To do that, they had to do more than follow processes and policies. They had to put their personality into every single message and go beyond the standard response.

The solution

We ran fact-finding workshops to get the teams’ input and understand what support they needed. We also audited comms from around the organisation. This helped us create a new tone of voice (‘Every word matters’) to support their brand promise (‘Every drop matters’). 

As well as creating a style guide full of helpful tips and examples, we: 

• ran a launch campaign and competitions to engage the teams with ‘Every word matters’ 

• rewrote their most-used templates and standard paragraphs 

• trained and coached their teams

• designed a quality assessment scorecard and helped team managers apply it consistently and fairly. 

The results

• Repeat contacts and escalations are reduced – by as much as 50% in Water Supply and 30% in Waste.

• 93% of live chat customers said they were ‘very satisfied’ with their communication in a survey following our work. 

• The team received a ‘compliance plus’ in a Customer Excellence accreditation.

• And, we’re delighted to say, our work won GOLD for Best Training at The UK Complaint Handling Awards 2019.