Having access to clean drinking water every day, at an affordable price, is a basic human right. To make sure we offer the best possible service, and that our long-term plans invest in the areas that matter most to customers, we need to have an ongoing conversation with our customers. We have an ongoing customer engagement and feedback programme, offering different ways for our customers to tell us what they think of our service and where we need to be better or do things differently, and to take into account people’s different situations and needs. 

To do this, we work with several carefully selected research partners, who we can trust to deliver our engagement programme in a professional and secure manner.

This page will help you be confident that, if our research partners do ever contact you on our behalf, it is a genuine request for feedback.

If you do have any concerns about why you are being contacted, then do please get in touch with our team and they can provide guidance.

Information we will never ask you to provide

Our research partners, will NEVER ask you for the following information in any of our feedback surveys, unless it is for the reasons given below. If you are asked for these specific details, which go against what is detailed below, then you should end taking part and report it to our team:

• Your date of birth – please note in most surveys we will ask for your age
• Your unique South Staffs Water account number
• Your bank details (Our research partners will only ask for bank details if they are following up to make a thank you payment for taking part in a focus group, workshop or interview or for completing a survey. Our partners will also always offer you an alternative means of payment, such as cheque or voucher, if you do not wish to be paid by bank transfer.)
  
  

• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity/background
• What you do for a living/if you are retired
• Your household income
• Number of people living in your home
• Whether or not you have a water meter
• Your  postcode (full or partial) – to make sure you are a customer
• Whether you are registered for our Priority Services Register
• Whether you receive a discounted tariff for your water bill
• Your contact details (typically your name, email and/or phone number).
  • We do this so we can let you know if you have won a prize draw, or to send you a voucher, which we sometimes offer customers as a thank you for giving feedback.
  • Our customer services team and/or our partners may also follow up on a request you might have made during the survey, such as wanting a call back to discuss a query. We will only do this if you give us explicit permission to do so through your feedback responses.
    
    

• Accent Research (currently working in partnership with Roots Research Limited as part of its research team)
• Blue Marble Research
• Box Clever
• Community Research
• Explain Market Research 
• Impact Research
• Qa Research
• Turquoise Thinking

Feedback requests from the water company regulator

Other organisations, such as the Consumer Council for Water, also contact customers on a regular basis to ask for feedback about how we are performing or to discuss a topic about water services.

Last updated: 2 August 2023