Our commitment to you
Our customer promise outlines how we'll work with you. It covers four key areas, which matter the most to our customers.
- We’ll resolve issues properly and quickly.
- We’ll own the problem.
- We’ll always keep you informed.
- We’ll be open and honest.
We offer account management tailored for your business, including account meetings set at a frequency to suit you. We find quarterly account meetings suit most of our customers, but it’s up to you how often we meet. Please let us know via your Retailer Relationship Manager.
We have an easy-to-follow escalation process for where, or when, you feel we may have fallen short of the high standards we set to deliver. We will always act as the ‘voice of the retailer’ within Southern Water and champion your recommendations for service improvements across the wider business.
What we offer
For our account meetings, we’ll put together:
- Regular conference calls or face-to-face quarterly meetings (frequency as requested)
- Monthly retailer reports sent to you including:
- SPID volumes / revenue and consumption data
- cases past SLA / rejected cases with reasons
- Market and Operational Performance standing of Southern Water
- 6-monthly R-MeX and service improvement discussions
- how can we do better?
- Key updates on current business / market hot topics / holistic data updates
We can also offer:
- 6-monthly Retailer Forums – discussing important business updates
- a quarterly newsletter
- a dedicated in-hours contact telephone number - (weekdays, 9am to 5pm)
- an escalation point-of-contact
- settlements advice
- general relationship and account advice via your Southern Water business contact
- specialist 24-hour non-household unplanned incident support.
Updates during unplanned events / incidents
Your relationship manager is the initial point of contact during an unplanned event or incident.
Incident information is regularly refreshed on our website, incident map, Facebook, and X-feeds. Our 24/7 water and wastewater emergency helpline is also available for you and non-household customers, call us on 0330 303 0368.
Please refer to our Incident Management Service Levels document below to understand what level of support to expect during a minor, major or significant incident.
Retailer communication
As well as your regular account meetings with us held either face to face or virtual (Teams), we’ll keep in contact with you via other channels including email, phone, social media, and retailer forums.
Our escalation routes
Stage 1 – Initially all escalations are reviewed by our Wholesale Service Desk Manager. The vast majority of our escalations are dealt with successfully at this stage.
Stage 2 – Any escalations that can’t be dealt with by the Wholesale Service Desk Manager will be passed to your Retailer Relationship Manager. This should give more focus on operational issues or complex service escalations.
Stage 3 – In the unlikely event your Retailer Relationship Manager cannot come to a resolution on your escalation, or you do not agree with the response, the issue can be escalated to the Wholesale Services Lead for review.
Stage 4 – The final level of escalation is to the Head of Operational Customer Service.
Want to talk?
If you want to discuss anything with us, please give Ben Day, your Retailer Relationship Manager an email at ben.day@southernwater.co.uk.
