Fans for Life 2 – Love What We Do Together
How Might We . . . enhance our Unrivalled Customer Experience Strategy so that our customers become our biggest fans?
Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) has an ambitious commitment to deliver an Unrivalled Customer Experience, but expectations, needs, and perceptions of customers continue to evolve.
Our current strategy “Living Water, Loving Customers. Our Unrivalled Customer Experience Strategy” covers our ambition and approach to 2028. The challenge is to ensure that the next iteration of the Unrivalled Customer Experience Strategy is not only evidence‑based, but co‑created with customers - grounded in what customers genuinely value, need, and experience when interacting with us. This sprint puts customers at the heart of strategy design, not as consultees, but as collaborators who will tell us how we encourage our customers to be our Fans for Life.
Over three and a half days, 30 customers - selected and screened, incentivised for their participation, - will be recognised as the experts in the tent on what unrivalled looks like and will work through:
- What unrivalled looks like to customers now. What customers expect from a water company in 2028 and beyond, in their own words, before being shown what we've already got.
- Demand for digital. What customers want NWG's digital experience to feel like - Ofwat expects the strategy to address this, and we'd rather hear it from customers than guess.
- What NWG should do with feedback. Customers tell NWG things every day. The sprint will surface what they'd like to see happen as a result - how feedback should drive continuous improvement, on customers' own terms.
- How we deepen customer engagement, and customers’ trust in us, through times of disruption. Big investment programmes mean roadworks, supply changes, bill conversations, and visible spending. The sprint will explore how NWG can run that programme in a way that strengthens the customer relationship rather than testing it.
The Sprint is sponsored by Explain and co-facilitated with Wordnerds. Two customer insight specialists working together to bring their unique experiences and disciplines.
Explain provide vast experience in bringing the customer voice to long term business planning as well as activities that get customers past expected service delivery into thinking deeply about what they actually need from the company behind the tap.
Working collaboratively Wordnerds and Explain can bring real anonymised feedback NWG customers have already shared into the room, so participants are reacting to what other customers actually said, not to what we imagine they said. Where customers raise an issue or an idea, Wordnerds can size it on the fly against the wider customer feedback dataset: is this just you, or are lots of other customers saying the same thing?
Coupled with expert lightening talks both organisations will draw on outside thinking on customer behaviour trends and ideas from other sectors that do this work well, so the strategy that emerges isn't anchored only to what the water industry is used to seeing.
Participants will work through a mix of structured design sessions, lightning talks, immersive activities, and live customer-experience exercises. They will spend time with people from inside and outside the water industry whose job is to understand customers.
Over the week, customers will:
- Hear directly what other NWG customers have already said and react to it.
- Try out customer-experience touchpoints themselves and feedback on what worked and what didn't.
- Hear from outside speakers on how customer behaviour and expectations are changing, so the strategy they help shape isn't anchored to today.
- Generate, refine, and prioritise ideas about what the next version of Unrivalled CX should contain.
On the final afternoon, customers will present what they've come up with directly to senior people from NWG - the people who'll commission the next stage of the work.
What the tent produces is a first cut of thinking, not a finished strategy.
It will then be further developed with NWG's People Panels, taken on the road to customers in Essex and Suffolk, and brought back to this same group of 30 to close the loop. The week is the start of a year of work, not the end of one.
By the close of the festival, the sprint will have delivered:
- A set of customer-grounded answers to "what should the next Unrivalled CX Strategy include?", in customers' own language, with the priorities customers themselves picked out.
- A specific view of what customers expect from NWG's digital experience and from how NWG uses feedback to improve.
- A short list of ideas robust enough to take to People Panels for the next round of testing.
- A presentation, given by customers themselves, to senior NWG leaders - the moment the rest of the year's strategy work officially begins.
We're deliberately not pinning down in advance what form the answer will take. It might be a set of guiding principles, a service-design brief, a customer-charter rewrite, or something we haven't thought of yet. The point of the week is that customers, not us, get to shape what falls out.
This sprint is closed recruitment.
NWG will select 30 customers (with support from the Sprint team) through a vetted process to make sure we get a tent of people who will lean into the work.
Within that 30, we're looking for:
- A range of NWG customers, bill-paying households, including some who've been in touch with NWG recently and some who haven't.
- A small number of customer-representing organisations (e.g. charitable groups working with customers in vulnerable circumstances), where the person attending is also a real customer.
- Enough range of life-stage, region, and engagement-level that what comes out of the room isn't a single demographic's view.
- Customers who, when screened, say they're up for getting stuck in. Reflective is fine; checked-out isn't.
Any questions: contact Elaine Erskine: elaine.erskine@nwl.co.uk or Lynn Fellows: lynn.fellows@nwl.co.uk