Consumer Council for Water

Consumer trust in water companies sat at 43%. Customers couldn't switch providers. And yet no one had defined — with evidence — what a customer-centric culture in the water sector looked like, let alone how you'd measure it. The Consumer Council for Water was heading into Price Review 2024 with a specific ambition: to make water companies demonstrably accountable for putting customers first. To do that, they needed a framework rigorous enough to influence national regulatory policy. They needed the evidence base to exist.

We didn't only look inside the industry for answers — we looked beyond it. Drawing on global and cross-sectoral research, we combined in-depth interviews with quantitative research to build something CCW could actually use: a practical, evidence-led definition of customer-centric culture, and a set of metrics specific enough to hold companies to account. The output was a published guide — six defining traits of customer-centric organisations, with clear recommendations on what to measure and how to publish it transparently. CCW embedded it directly into their Water Mark performance framework. All 26 water companies are now assessed against it.