Customer Experience Management for Water Utilities

Book excerpt: Customer Experience Management for Water Utilities presents a practical framework for water utilities to become more focussed on their customers. This framework is founded on Service-Dominant Logic, a contemporary theory of marketing that explains value creation as a process of co-creation between the customer and the service provider. Standard models for marketing do not apply to monopolistic water utilities without modification. The first two chapters develop a marketing mix tailored to water utilities to assist them with providing customer-centric services. The water utility marketing mix includes the value proposition, internal marketing, service quality and customer relationships. he book discusses the four dimensions of the marketing mix. Chapter three presents a template for developing value propositions to assist water utilities in positioning their service. This model is based on the needs and wants of individual customer segments and the type of service. Chapter four discusses internal marketing, activities designed to improve the way utilities add value for customers. This chapter also analyses potential tensions between engineering and science-oriented employees and proposes methods to resolve these tensions. The final chapters describe customer relationships from both a theoretical and practical perspective. The customer experience is a complex phenomenon that is difficult to quantify. The book provides a method to measure the experience of the customer, based on service quality theory and psychometric statistics. Customer Experience Management for Water Utilities is one of the first books that discusses urban water supply from a marketing perspective. This perspective provides a unique insight into an industry which is often dominated by technological concerns. This book is a valuable resource for Water Utility Managers and Regulators, as well as for Marketing Consultants seeking to assist water utilities to become more customer focussed.