Our performance

We're focused on water quality and proud to have delivered consistently strong results throughout the year. Our consistent results provide comfort that our procedures and processes in place are adequate to ensure this trend continues in coming years.

We’re focused on letting our customers know about interruptions to their water supply as soon as possible by pre-notifying customers about emergency works and providing them with the opportunity to fill up water for use while we carry out our works. We implemented a system change to optimise customer records enabling us to send more proactive notifications.

Shorter duration tasks including repairs to hydrants, fireplugs and property service pipes reflected 49 per cent of works during 2019-20 which contributed to the reduction in the average outage duration. Efficiencies identified with regards to the repair of water mains produced a three-minute reduction on average during the year, which also impacted the final year result.

While this is only an interim figure due to reporting timelines, the operating cost per property result is above target and falls just outside our tolerance band for the first time during this regulatory period, (by less than one per cent). Lower growth in our customer numbers against forecast coupled with significant costs related to our coronavirus (COVID-19) response and the support we provided our customers were the main factors behind the higher than forecast result.

Our Customer Care team have achieved results consistently ahead of monthly projections through a new proactive outreach program and increased awareness of our support options. Our Customer Care team are coming up with new and different ways to provide and promote awareness of our support options which has also aided in referrals for support from financial counsellors, micro contact centres around the business and Priority Plumbing. Customers assisted also surged towards the latter half of the year due to coronavirus (COVID-19) impacts on our customers.

This year we raised the bar for customer satisfaction, value and trust ratings by lifting our measure of ‘positive’ from six or above to seven or above. We’re confident this change will drive continuous improvement in behaviour to continually improve our service to our customers. 

As mentioned above, this measure has seen a change in how we score, however remains positive when compared to original targets. The value of what we deliver has been the focus of communications to customers in bill banners throughout the year along with an increase in social media messaging and other campaigns.

We measured our emissions for 2019-20 at 32,007 tCO2-e, based on estimated Scope 1 emissions.  We'll update this as data becomes available, which can take several months to compile due to the nature of calculating emissions from different water recycling plant processes.

The positive result achieved around EPA reportable sewer spills this year is very encouraging with the extreme variety of climate conditions experienced over the past twelve months. Extremely dry ground conditions, for the most part, were inundated with rainfall for the first four months of 2020 which gives our ongoing maintenance and renewal programs confidence that we have the right processes in place.