Customers are turning increasingly to digital and social media platforms to contact service providers regarding billing and service queries. For large utilities and service providers, such as Southern Water, these new channels provide an opportunity to transform communications with their customers.

Jane McLaughlin has worked with Southern Water for more than 15 years, from brand and digital strategy and implementation to behaviour change campaigns and helping to drive forward their use of online and social media communications.

Our work has included brand strategy and implementation, digital strategy and delivery of online transactional services, such as moving house, customer account management and corporate reporting, customer communications, exhibitions, stakeholder engagement, educational resources, games and apps. More recently, we worked with Southern Water to devise and implement a strategy for social media engagement and customer service.

We devised an approach for engaging with customers to quickly identify and triage queries and potential complaints, giving the customer a responsive service, with additional choice, providing information and transparency, with an open, honest and ‘human’ tone of voice.

We developed internal systems and processes for the teams to manage content, emergency planning and responses, as well as reporting and analysis, to measure the impact of these channels.

Customers now interact extensively with the company via social media, in particular, Twitter and Facebook.

“Always maintaining a professional approach, Jane was always available for consultation, advice and guidance seeking only to deliver what was in my organisation’s best interests.” Programme Director, Southern Water