Ofwat has named Welsh, Portsmouth and Wessex Water as the best performing companies for customer experience while Thames, Southern and Affinity are bottom of the table.
The customer measure of experience (C-MeX) replaced service incentive mechanism (SIM) scores for domestic customers as part of PR19 alongside the introduction of developer service measure of experience (D-MeX) scores.
Portsmouth topped the D-Mex league followed by Wessex and Northumbrian. Yorkshire, Affinity and SES scored lowest on D-MeX.
After a pilot year for the new mechanism this is the first year all companies have been scored from information gathered from interviews with customers during 2019-20.
Aileen Armstrong, senior director at Ofwat, said: “Customers rightly expect companies to provide an excellent level of service and today’s scores provide a strong indication of which companies are doing well and which companies need to step up a gear to provide an improved level of service. We are confident that C-MeX and D-MeX will encourage companies to deliver better customer experiences while also measuring performance across companies consistently, reliably and fairly.”
With the system now in full effect companies can gain outperformance payments or incur underperformance returns to billpayers of up to £20million for the lowest ranked companies.
The full list with their C-MeX score for 2019-20 is:
- Welsh Water (82.47)
- Portsmouth (82.09)
- Wessex (81.05)
- United Utilities (79.76)
- Northumbrian (79.64)
- Yorkshire (79.20)
- Anglian (79.01)
- Bristol (78.13)
- Severn Trent (77.65)
- South Staffs (77.47)
- South West 76.35)
- Hafren Dyfrdwy (75.01)
- South East (73.36)
- SES (72.85)
- Affinity (72.70)
- Southern (68.85)
- Thames (65.12)
D-MeX scores for 2019-20:
- Portsmouth (87.81)
- Wessex (87.73)
- Northumbrian (86.62)
- Severn Trent (86.27)
- Anglian (85.91)
- South West (85.64)
- United Utilities (85.46)
- Bristol (84.92)
- Welsh (84.38)
- South East (82.05)
- South Staffs (81.56)
- Thames (79.34)
- Hafren Dyfrdwy (78.73)
- Southern (75.70)
- SES (74.83)
- Affinity (74.38)
- Yorkshire (69.57)