Giving tomorrow’s adults a say in the future

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The idea that the young should have a say in shaping their futures has become more pronounced in recent years. In 2016, the UK government launched a major inquiry into intergenerational unfairness, which is seen as engendering anger and fear among younger consumers, who perceive the state-pension and welfare systems as favouring the older generation.

That baby boomers control most of the country’s wealth – having enjoyed secure, better-paid jobs, low property prices and free education – is another reason for young people to feel they have been dealt a raw deal.

Last June’s European Union (EU) referendum exacerbated feelings of resentment, when the vote for Brexit was said to have been largely swayed by the very same older generation, with the youth bemoaning what they viewed as the forcible inheritance of economic and political uncertainty.

Against this backdrop of the old shaping the futures of the young, Wessex Water decided to speak with teenagers – the future generation of bill-payers and a group notoriously hard to engage with – to discover their ideas and hopes for the future.

Engaging youth

The Bath-based company eschewed the conventional approach to reaching sixth-form students and, instead, sought to engage with them at a deeper level. It essentially formed a non-executive board of 21 teens and gave them a say in the business’s future.

The aim was twofold: to understand what Wessex Water’s future customer service would look like, and how it can be planned accordingly; and to grasp how some of the decisions the company makes today will affect future generations.

“They have grown up in the digital age; they have all got a smartphone; they may have completely different expectations in terms of service from our current customers,” says Harriet Penrose, Wessex Water’s customer and stakeholder engagement programme manager.

Penrose took up the newly created role when she joined Wessex Water in June last year, and the ‘Young People’s Panel’ is her first major research project at the organisation.

“Wessex has always done continuous customer research, but this role is leading up to [regulator] Ofwat’s price review, PR19,” she says. “There’s additional work we need to do for that, to demonstrate that our business plans have sound, robust evidence – that we have done enough with customers to support the plans we have got, and that they are acceptable to customers.”

Penrose’s career has spanned agency- and client-side, and she has worked for the likes of market research firm Ipsos, the BBC, Oxfam and the Red Cross. At Wessex Water, she reports to Sue Lindsay, director of customer policy and engagement, whose promotion led to the creation of Penrose’s position.

The research team at Wessex Water gauges and monitors customer sentiment through continuous research, while ad-hoc pieces are used to ensure it has the evidence it needs for its business plan. For the Young People’s Panel, it worked with agency Blue Marble, with which it already enjoyed a close relationship.

Wessex is also working with Accent on a large customer evaluation project – a “very specific, technical piece of work” that involves a “stated-preference survey, asking people what levels of service customers are prepared to accept from us and how much more, or less, they would be prepared to pay for us to increase our services”.

Market dynamics

Water is an interesting market, not least because water companies are effectively regional monopolies – consumers cannot shop around and switch suppliers.

This is about to change for business customers and, potentially, for consumers too if the government opens the domestic market to competition. “If it does go ahead, customer insight will be needed a lot more than it already is,” Penrose says. In the meantime, factors such as lack of competition and customer data present challenges for her and her peers. 

“You can’t observe behaviour in the way that you can in other industries,” she says. “So we rely on stated-preference surveys to ascertain how well people feel we are doing on particular service areas.”

Customers also take water for granted and only really think about their supplier if there is a problem. “Otherwise, it’s like an invisible service that you only think about once a year, when your bill comes through.”

Water companies have an impact on many aspects of people’s lives beyond supplying homes with water, but many consumers are oblivious to this. “Supply and sewage is quite a wide area, and water companies influence a lot of things in the environment, but it’s difficult to get people to understand that we make decisions that affect the environment outside the door,” Penrose says. 

Given the monopolistic, behind-the-scenes nature of the industry, it would be forgivable to suppose water companies don’t need to engage in much marketing. There are, however, messages that need to reach audiences – such as promoting water efficiency and, ultimately, persuading customers to have water meters.

“There’s a lot of interesting insight, behaviourally, on how people use water and there may be a role for research in helping to segment people and develop communications around how they can be more sensitive with their water use,” Penrose says.

“A lot of people find their bills go down after having a water meter installed and, because of that, they start becoming more aware of the water they use – so their water usage goes down even more.”

While an absence of competition might suggest a relatively relaxed marketplace, water companies operate in a regulatory environment, which presents various challenges. Ofwat demands that companies adhere to a regulatory cycle, with firms obliged to share business plans and back them up with evidence.

“But Ofwat isn’t prescriptive about the kind of evidence we should supply,” Penrose says. “It wants to give guidelines for water companies to own their own customers and their research. So we need to demonstrate to ourselves that we’ve done it in a way Ofwat is happy with.”

Next generation

One of Wessex Water’s obligations to Ofwat is that it speaks to future bill payers to help shape its plans. Typically when attempting to talk to students, utility companies have employed a decades-old approach of in-school educational sessions, but last year Wessex Water decided to rewrite the rules.

“It was just getting going when I arrived,” Penrose says. “The company was doing a big review of customer engagement and we’d identified that the way we talked to young people hadn’t necessarily worked.”

Penrose is referring to more conventional practices of going into schools and “taking over a geography lesson”.

“It felt like that approach didn’t really speak to  young people on their own level, that it was yet another relationship that was very much ‘teacher-pupil’. We wanted to take it out of the school environment.”

Wessex Water and Blue Marble had both been thinking about different ways to engage with young people, to create a “more equitable exchange of ideas”. “We felt that, if we offered them an opportunity that gave them something – a bit of work experience and immersion in what working life is like – they would be much more responsive.”

The project was influenced by BBC television’s The Apprentice, with groups attempting to impress senior executives by overcoming challenges and presenting new ideas. As a result, Wessex Water’s managing director, Andy Pymer, and other senior management were involved from day one.

The Young People’s Panel kicked off last September with a one-day event at the company’s headquarters in Bath, during which the 21 students were “immersed in the water industry”. The sixth-form pupils had been recruited towards the end of the 2015/16 academic year, after youngsters from 50 comprehensive and private schools in the Wessex Water region were invited to apply.

Panel membership was incentivised with a £100 reward and a formal reference that they could use in their university or apprenticeship applications.

During the day, the students were taught about the water business and got to meet and quiz various senior staff from Wessex Water. They were encouraged to stay in touch via Wessex Water’s Facebook page, while an online questionnaire covering similar topics was sent to the schools, garnering 578 responses from the wider student population.

After going away for three months – during which time the four groups from different schools stayed in contact to collaborate – they returned to Bath for a day in December, to present their ideas for the business. The best suggestions were awarded prizes and trophies, with plans to implement some of them within the business.

Ideas put forward by the students ranged from a smart meter-enabled app to branding and pricing solutions. “They had a really good idea for metering that we hadn’t necessarily thought about before,” Penrose says. 

“What we tend to do with new meters is that – after two years – people can decide not to have them any more. But the students suggested that, if you’d lost money [by paying more after having a meter installed], you’d get your money back. That gets rid of a barrier to taking up a meter in the first place. 

“We thought that was a canny idea and we’re seriously considering introducing something similar to that.”

Wessex Water is also considering following up on another student-group suggestion to use more case-study scenarios, making water consumption “real for people in terms of how their use might be different”.

The students said a water company should be more vocal, and proposed ideas to raise Wessex Water’s profile through local initiatives such as branded bottled water.

“One of them suggested we build a massive water park,” Penrose says. “But we have thought that sponsoring local water features and swimming pools may be a more useful way to get our name out there.”

Of course, there are few better testaments to effectiveness than a desire to repeat a project, and last year’s scheme is on the agenda again in 2017. “We’re having a planning meeting next month,” Penrose says, adding that recruitment is likely to start in a couple of months’ time.

Wessex Water is thinking of inviting a similar-sized group of students as last year, but from a broader range of schools – and new elements could include an additional meeting, or perhaps something via Skype.

The company was delighted with how the inaugural panel fared – not least members of the executive board. 

“Senior management really enjoyed it and found it refreshing to talk to young people,” Penrose says. “They could see it was something new, and that no other water company – as far as we know – had done anything like this before.”

Penrose admits that the panel approach was “more labour intensive than other research methods” given the need to ensure Pymer’s diary was free, and that everyone was on board and fully briefed. “Internally, it involved more costs than traditional focus groups,” she says.

But the expense was justified by the results. The Young People’s Panel was no mere box-ticking exercise and the insights, findings and ideas gleaned from the project are not to be filed away and forgotten.

Instead they will form a key part of the business’s plans – including contributing to its PR19 reporting to Ofwat, due next year, and helping to shape Wessex Water’s future for the generations ahead.