Our strategies and plans

Our customer engagement and feedback programme

Latest update August 2023 - During August 2023, we will be sending e-mails and letters out to customers across the South Staffs Water region asking them to take part in an important research study. This will involve asking people to feedback on our proposed business plans for the period 2025 – 2030. It will cover the investments we plan to make to improve the service and also how the plan might impact on customers’ water bills in the future. We will then review the feedback and decide what changes we need to make to the plans to ensure they are acceptable and affordable to customers. This research study is mandated by the water regulator, Ofwat, as it is for all water companies in England and Wales. We are working with our accredited research partner, Accent, to carry out the research on our behalf. The research is optional, but we hope you decide to take part should you be contacted for feedback. 

In addition to this, we also have an important research study running throughout August to gain customer feedback on how we can best support customers with their water bills. We are working with our accredited research partner, Qa Research, who are carrying out the research on our behalf.

If you have any further questions about the research, please e-mail us at communicationsteam@south-staffs-water.co.uk

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.)

Information we will ask you to provide

When taking part in any of our surveys or engagement, we need to collect information in order to be able to understand different people’s views to the questions asked. You will often be asked for all, or some, of the following details listed below. Remember, we will give you the choice in all our feedback surveys to choose not to answer any of these questions, or you can stop completing the survey at any time if you don’t feel comfortable:
  • 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.

Why we may contact you

In our Privacy Policy we give details about our legitimate interest for contacting you through our independent research partners and how we use your personal details. 

You can opt-out of receiving any feedback requests from us at any time by informing the research partner who has contacted you, or by sending us a message directly using the form on our contact us page. Once we have updated your account you, will no longer receive any more requests from us for feedback, unless you choose to opt back in by contacting us.

Who we work with
There are a number of ways we might get in touch with you to ask for your feedback and we really hope you do spend some time to give us your thoughts if you are contacted to take part.

Our partners hold any personal details they collect, on our behalf, securely and we audit them regularly (at least once a year) to ensure they have the right measures in place to keep your personal details safe for the period they hold them for.

Our ongoing monthly customer feedback programme covers the following:

H2Online Community

You may receive a request to register for our online customer community, which is run by us on behalf of our partners Explain Market Research. Either Explain, or our team, may contact you to see if you would like to join the H2Online Community. If you are already a member you will receive regular email newsletters from the team at Explain, on our behalf, which will promote new activities to get involved with.

Feedback surveys following a contact with us

If you contact with us with a query about your services, pay a bill or if you are contacted by one of our teams, we will often ask for feedback about how you found the experience and how the person helping you did. This will be through a short feedback survey sent by email or SMS text messages by our partners Qualtrics.

Feedback surveys about your service experience

We send out feedback requests to ask customers about their experiences of their water supply and the other services they receive from us, even if they haven't contacted us recently. Our team send out requests by email with a survey link and we work closely with our partners Turquoise Thinking whose team of researchers also make telephone calls to customers to gain feedback.

Feedback surveys about what’s important to customers

To make sure we can keep up to date with what’s most important to customers and where we need to invest to improve our service in the future, we work with our partners Accent. Our team send out requests by email with a survey link to customers and Accent then collect the feedback on our behalf.

Other customer feedback requests
We also sometimes run other research studies on an ad-hoc basis when we need customers’ views to help shape our long-term plans. We work with research partners to carry out these studies and they may contact you on our behalf to invite you to take part in a focus group or workshop, join an online community, or to complete a survey by email, over the phone or face-to-face.

The full list of our research partners is shown below:

Feedback requests from the water company regulator

In addition to our own customer feedback programme, you may be selected at any time to be contacted by the water regulator, Ofwat, for feedback about our service. Ofwat has appointed the independent research agency Accent to administer these feedback surveys.


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