Price review 23-24

Customer service channels and website

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What we asked...
Should Icon Water increase their investment in customer service tools?

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What you told us...

Few issues were expressed in relation to the level of existing customer service and support provided by Icon Water. As a result, participants generally did not see the need to improve these tools. Just one-quarter of customer survey participants supported Icon Water spending more on customer service and website upgrades.

Discussion about Icon Water’s responsiveness identified the following:

  • Nine-in-ten customer survey participants would want to be able to log an emergency via direct ‘hotline’. Qualitative exploration revealed that most people need to speak to someone knowledgeable to understand the plan for resolving the issue and to ask advice on what they need to do.
  • How quickly Icon Water could commence resolution , for example how fast a team could be dispatched to the site (most wanted assistance to arrive within an hour for an emergency).
  • A need to be kept in the loop by SMS or email in relation to Icon Water’s arrival on site, the anticipated time until the issue can be resolved, and notification of completion.

Channel preferences: a 24/7 phone hotline was preferred for reporting emergencies and to seek advice on next steps. For less urgent matters, telephone, online web forms and/or email were preferred channels –with half of customer survey participants preferring calling and the other half preferring online contact channels.
Almost half of customer survey participants aged under 44 years of age would also value the option to web chat (to enable multitasking while waiting for problem resolution).

One-view and application status tracking: Large customers preferred to be able to have a single view of their account. Most customers expected to be able to easily track the status of their enquiries and applications

Website tools: There were unprompted mentions of a desire to use the website to find out about water and wastewater outages in the ACT. Support for this idea was based on avoiding potential customer service delays caused by large numbers of customers contacting Icon Water at the same time to ask about the same outage/overflow, as well as to be informed about anticipated time until resolution of the issue in their area by real-time updates.