Affinity Water: The Ultimate Guide
During the peak of the Coronavirus crises, many families faced financial hardship, especially when it came to keeping up with their essential bills like water. Affinity Water aimed to support customers through the crises by offering solutions that will help them through the tough months and keep their heads above water. If you would like to read more information or learn more about the pricing of business energy, you can do so here .
Who is Affinity Water?
Seen as one of the largest water-only service providers in the United Kingdom, Affinity Water is dedicated to giving all of its client’s high-quality water service at all times.
Its mission is to be the foremost community-focused water provider in the United Kingdom. Approximately 78,000 non-household connections and 1.4 million houses get 950 million litres of water per day from the company.
They are responsible for 100 water treatment plants and around 16,500 kilometres of water mains, which is the distance between London and Sydney.
Supply-chain management
Affinity Water’s service area includes portions of Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Surrey, the London Boroughs of Harrow, and Hillingdon, as well as portions of the London Boroughs of Barnet, Brent, Ealing, and Enfield, among other counties and municipalities. In addition, they provide water to the Tendring peninsula in Essex and the Folkestone and Dover districts of the United Kingdom.
As part of its efforts to make sure that it is serving the communities’ requirements and bringing consumers closer to its business choices, Affinity Water has reached out to its customers in two unique new methods. An Affinity Water customer focus group has been formed to assist in co-creating the services the company is delivering to guarantee that its future business strategy fulfils the expectations of its customers. The company obtained direct customer input on subjects such as what consumers thought of the website’s My Account page and Home Move page.
Affinity Water has also taken steps to ensure that all of its employees are aware of the debt and debt relief services that the company provides so that they may, in turn, reach out to customers who are experiencing financial difficulties. More individuals are expected to become aware of the debt relief programs available.
Participation in a focus group
Participants in the focus group had previously used the My Account page, so they could talk from personal experience on how they believed the service was offered.
“We want to conduct these focus groups regularly as part of our efforts to understand better our customers’ demands and the issues we encounter,” said Luke Sambridge, Head of Business Excellence & Transformation. Upon further investigation, we discovered that consumers appreciated the additional adjustments made to the MyAccount page. We were able to validate how simple the website was to use and add a variety of additional features to make the site even better in the future. “This is the beginning of a long-term customer-closeness initiative that will enable us to communicate with consumers regularly about the topics that are important to them. To co-create our service offering, we will collaborate with our consumers.”
Customers in need of mental health assistance may be reached out to during Affordability Week.
We’re introducing yet another new practice that will help to bring consumers and employees closer together. Affinity Water launched an Affordability Week in the first week of May. The company demonstrated best practices throughout the organisation to all of its employees on how to provide debt relief to those who are most in need.
James Tipler, Head of Billing & Debt Management, said that the company has gone out to all of its employees by displaying all of the debt work that Affinity Water had been doing:
“Our debt relief programs are meant to ‘lift’ the financial weight off the shoulders of our consumers. On a global scale, we have reached out to over 100,000 clients who have requested financial assistance in various ways. We hope that our efforts during Affordability Week at the beginning of May to raise awareness among all employees about the assistance we can provide customers who are experiencing financial difficulties will result in even more people becoming aware of our debt help and support services in the future.’
Instead of waiting for our customers to come to us for assistance, we want to be proactive in alerting them about our debt relief services throughout our customer engagements and contacts, whether over the phone or in person in the field. We are aware that debt is one of the leading causes of poor mental health, and we believe that by ensuring our employees have the necessary knowledge, we will be able to assist clients in improving their mental health as Mental Health Awareness Week gets underway.”
Affinity Water’s financial assistance programs include a variety of various payment choices and budgeting strategies, as well as alternate tariffs and our priority services register, among other things. Customers have already been assisted in the past, which is shown in case study guidance.
As a consequence of its coronavirus assistance, Affinity Water has assisted 7,100 clients with payment breaks of up to three months. It has a total of 80,000 clients on its low-income rate at the moment.
It is reaching out to an additional 20,000 clients who are experiencing-personal difficulties to assist them with their yearly expenses. The addition of a new advice page to the National Debtline website has allowed the organisation to reach out to more people than it had previously been able to, and it will continue to do so.
To assist customers in difficult situations, Affinity Water created a crisis fund on March 1st, 2021, in association with Auriga Services, a hardship charity, to be used in conjunction with other programs. In the first month of operation, 100 consumers were recommended to the company.
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