The Water Horizon Forum (WHF) is the first time we have pulled together a research community of this kind.
The WHF were recruited via an on-street survey and closely represent our diverse customer base, including business customers, and consists of people of different ages and genders, at different life stages, and from different geographic locations, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The insight we gain through the panel helps us to reflect their needs, priorities and preferences in our day-to-day decision-making and longer-term strategic plans.
The WHF is managed on our behalf by Accent, an independent research agency, and gives us unprecedented ongoing access to a community of 142 ‘Expert Customers’ from across our supply area for us to utilise.
Who are the Water Horizon Forum?
The members of the Water Horizon Forum have committed to being on this journey with us for two years, and consists of:
The members of WHF (household current, future household and business customers) are spread across five locations, which are:
The 76 current household bill-paying customers were recruited to ensure representation for different social grades/levels of affluence, life stages and genders. We included family group interactions to capture intergenerational views.
The 40 future customers were recruited to ensure a good mix of different ages. Across the five locations, there are:
Intergenerational families
Our family group interactions were designed to resemble the sort of conversations that families have around the Sunday dinner table taking place in the comfort of their homes.
Different generations of families feature in our long-term customer insight, enabling us to see the intergenerational variations and changes in attitudes.
We have six intergenerational families included in the Water Horizon Forum, with each family consisting of three generations: grandparents (billpayers), children (billpayers) and grandchildren (future billpayers).
Business members
Business panel members cover a range of different sectors, some of which are water dependent (meaning use of water is key to their business operations) and those where business operations are not reliant on the supply of water.
A range of different organisation types are represented on the WHF including:
- High street retail/services
- (cafes, hairdresser, shops)
- Manufacturing
- Business services
- Dog groomer
- Livery yard, Agriculture
These businesses vary in size in terms of the number of employees although all fall into the SME category (i.e. less than 250 employees).
What do the Water Horizon Forum do?
Our Water Horizon Forum has become an expert customer panel and has helped us in providing valuable insight through a number of different research activities.
By engaging the same group of customers on several different topics, the members benefit from increased knowledge, which allows more informed views and means we could deliberate on more complex issues. They have also challenged us on how well we have reflected their views and feedback in our plans as they developed.
Our intergeneration family groups have also participated in 'QualiBox’, our own version of Gogglebox, to help understand responses to the environmental challenges we face.
Since the WHF started in 2021, they have dedicated their time and knowledge to help us understand:
- about their experiences as a water customer
- what challenges they see we face as a company (through the building of a ‘challenge wall’)
- what priorities do they identify in the short and longer-term
- what we need to do to make our service more resilient across our different regions
- what they think of our environmental ambition
- what they see as our strategic direction
- how we should act as a responsible business
- their view on the supply issues we’ve faced across our regions
- how we plan to deliver our service far in to the future
- how we fund our investments
- and if our overall business plan is affordable and accepted by customers.
This enabled us to reflect customers’ views in our most ambitious draft business plan for 2025-2030 published in early October 2023.
We would like to thank our Water Horizon Forum members for being on this journey with us and giving up their time to provide us with their invaluable thoughts and views.
What have the Water Horizon Said?
We have captured the key developments that the Water Horizon Forum have contirubuted to our plans - Click the button below to read the findings.