WaterVoice – July 2020

CCW’s online research community – WaterVoice – was launched in 2020 to help us keep our finger on the pulse of water consumers’ views. The reports summarise the views of people in this community. It is made up of hundreds of water bill payers from across England and Wales whose views we regularly seek on issues relating to the water industry and the work of CCW itself.

This page features some of the findings to emerge from WaterVoice which provide a flavour of customers’ views that may be of particular interest to other water sector stakeholders. Although the community’s views may not be entirely representative of the wider public, it does provide valuable insights that can complement the statistically robust programme of consumer research we carry out every year.

All of these findings help us to deepen our understanding of consumers’ views and priorities and ensure we’re focusing on the issues that matter most to the people we represent.

These tasks spanned from 30 June to 22 July 2020, and consisted of three tasks:

• Water companies and their social purpose – this activity explored participants’ views on the concept of water companies having a ‘social contract’ or ‘social purpose’.
• Water Mark: Your water company’s performance made clear – this introduced participants to Water Mark, a tool that presents water company performance data in a way that allows comparisons to be made between water companies according to a number of criteria.
• Discussing the quality of your drinking water at home – this was a follow-up activity to the survey conducted in June: ‘A glass half full or empty? Tell us about your tap water!’. An online discussion group was conducted with participants who had rated the quality of their tap water negatively in the survey.