Phase one: explore - closed

Every four years we submit a plan to our economic regulator, the Essential Services Commission of South Australia (ESCOSA). Our Plan 2020-2024 is due to ESCOSA in 2019 and will outline how we’ll operate and deliver services over these four years. ESCOSA will use Our Plan to determine the revenue we can collect from customers via their bills for water and sewerage services during this period.

Our customers are at the heart of everything we do and we are working together with you to develop Our Plan 2020-2024 to ensure we understand the services and outcomes you want us to prioritise.

Phase one of our customer engagement process ran until December 2017 and explored data and feedback we had gathered through existing customer research. We then worked with customers to understand more about some key areas.

In phase one we worked to understand the services most important to our customers and what we need to maintain, improve or reduce in our services.

We engaged with our customers to further understand what they want from us as their water services provider so we could consider this feedback as we plan for 2020-24.

We engaged with our customers and community in a number of different ways:

• Survey of more than 1,200 customers and community members about their attitudes toward us and the services we provide.
• Survey of about 3,000 customers about their service experience when reporting a fault, making an account enquiry or applying for a new connection or extension.
• Six focus groups and eight in-depth interviews with business and residential customers about their experiences and expectations of us.
• Survey of about 800 regional customers about the quality of their tap water and how it could improve.
• Analysis of our Take the Tap Test data to better understand the scientific make up of our customers' favourite tap water.
• Mapping the journeys of 48 customers who had experienced a fault, applied for a new connection, made a general enquiry, lodged a complaint, or received a trade waste service, to understand their delights and pain points.

From October to December 2017 we held customer sessions across South Australia to better understand customer and community views about how we can protect the environment and provide a reliable service.

Ahead of phase two we recruited a Customer Group which is working with us through phases two and three.

How people engaged in phase one

During this phase:

• people read our document 'things that matter most to our customers' based on previous research
• people joined the conversation through four discussion forum topics (see below)
• 168 people attended customer engagement workshops held around the state from October to December
• 23 people attended a drop-in session at the multicultural centre in Adelaide
• people responded to our quick surveys and polls available on Water Talks.