Support we provide
Our By Your Side strategy
Our strategy sets out what it means to be ‘By Your Side’ at those times when you need extra help. Our commitment is to make sure we’re with you every step of the way, trusting us to always meet your needs, whatever they may be and whenever you need us. We built the strategy together with our customers, partners and colleagues, to make sure we’ve included what really matters to you.
The key areas of our strategy include:
- Our principles for supporting customers who need extra help
- The support available for our customers, including our Priority Services Register
- Our short and long-term commitments
- Some examples of our work in the community
By Your Side principles
We’ll make it easy for you
- You won’t be asked to do anything complicated to be supported – we’ll make it straightforward, easy and tailored to your needs.
- We’re always working to make our systems and processes simpler and more effective for customers.
We’ll deliver services with care
- Our colleagues will deliver each interaction with true compassion and attention to your individual needs. We’ll never focus on call handling time, making sure the focus is on quality conversations and support.
- We’re always looking for ways to get to know our customers better, so we know what they need from us.
We’ll listen, learn and improve
- We’ll ask you for feedback on how we’re doing, and we’ll always look for ways to improve.
- We’ll regularly review customer feedback, to make sure we’re listening to what you need from us. We have a continuous learning culture, so our colleagues can always make things better for customers.
Support available
Yorkshire is the largest county in the UK – with a population of over 5.4 million people. Within Yorkshire, there are large proportions of people living with a disability, mental health problems, financial challenges, or other circumstances meaning they might need extra help. Our support ranges from talking you through your bill, to signposting you to external organisations who may be able to help.
Help paying your bill
We offer a variety of financial support schemes for customers who may be struggling to pay their bill. There's also helpful links to external companies who may be able to support you with more than just your water bill.
Priority Services
If you need any help accessing our services – for example getting your bill in another format, additional reassurance it’s us visiting your home, or speaking to us via an interpreter – we can help.
Alternative bill formats
We offer bills in standard format, braille, CD, large print or read to you over the telephone.
Nominating someone to help manage your account
If you’re unable to manage your account yourself, either permanently or temporarily, you can nominate a trusted person to do this for you. This does not have to be confirmed via a power of attorney, and you can update this at any time.
Getting a password for home visits
If you’d like reassurance it’s us visiting your home, you can set up a code word for our colleagues to share with you. Remember, if you ever have doubts about who is visiting you, please call 0800 1 38 78 78 to check the employee number printed on the ID card.
Getting in touch
Options for contacting us
Depending on your preferences, you can call us on the phone, submit a callback request or fill in once of our online forms. To access these channels, follow the steps on our get in touch page.
Using interpreter services
You can speak to our colleagues over the phone, or visiting your home, through an interpreter service. This is available for a range of alternative languages, if English is not your first or preferred language, and also for British Sign Language users.
Contact us through a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter
You can also find BLS options on our get in touch page.
Support following a bereavement
Losing a loved one is a difficult time, so we’re here to support you in any way we can. We have a dedicated bereavement team, with specially trained colleagues to support you through closing or updating an account following a loss.
When contacting us, you can select the option to go straight through to this team on the phone, meaning you don’t have to be passed around unnecessarily. From there, our team will support you manage your account and understand anything else you may need from us to make things a little easier. You can also request a callback if this is easier. To learn more about this, and what to expect, visit our bereavement webpage.
Support for water or sewage problems
What happens if my water supply is interrupted?
If we've advised you not to use your water or you have no water for long period of time, we may provide bottled water at a collection point.
If you're unable to collect bottled water or you need extra help during an incident, please make sure you're on our Priority Services Register.
If you’ve been unable to use your water, not had access to bottled water from us, and had to buy your own bottled water – we may be able to reimburse you for the cost. Please let us know by requesting a free call back.
Getting incident updates
To make sure you get updates on incidents, make sure you opt in for our text message service. To do this, call us on 0345 1 24 24 24.
Learn more about how we manage incidents
What happens if I have a problem with sewerage?
We aim to prioritise customer jobs dependent on a variety of factors, which includes your personal circumstances. Make sure you tell us about anything else we need to know, when logging a problem with us online or over the phone.
Experiencing issues with your water supply or sewerage is never easy. Our colleagues are trained to identify and support your needs, so please let them know if there’s anything else we can do to make things easier for you.
What to expect from our Priority Services Register
1. Identifying your needs
We’ve trained colleagues to be able to identify your needs during each of your interactions with us. This means we can help signpost you to our Priority Services Register and the extra help available, without you needing to ask. Or, you can self-sign up via online and telephone channels any time you like.
2. The sign up process
You can tell us about your circumstances and then select which services you'd like to receive from us, to help support your needs.
Some services are also automatically allocated, based on our understanding of needs, to help you access the right services for you. We also automatically enrol certain groups of customers, where we believe they’d benefit based on insights and industry best practice. Sign up doesn’t require any evidence or payment.
3. Welcome to the Priority Services Register
When you sign up for Priority Services, or are automatically enrolled, you will receive a personalised welcome letter.
The welcome letter will include details of the services customers have been enrolled on, and what they can expect.
4. Checking in
We want to make sure your needs and services are up-to-date, and continue to meet your requirements.
To see if there’s anything else we can do to support, we’ll check in every 2 years.
5. Receiving your service
Some services are automatic, like delivering bills in a specific format, others are available as you need them, such as requesting a password during a home visit.
We’ve developed a process to capture how customers feel about the service they’ve received, during interruptions to their water supply. Going forward, we’re looking for ways to capture this for every Priority Services Register service, to make sure we’re delivering what customers need from us.
We always strive to provide the best service possible, however if we fail to meet our high expectations, we’ll make it easy for you to receive the right compensation. For more information, please see our Customer Charter. Our Charter also includes information on the “Guaranteed Service Standards” (GSS), which follows the industry standard approach for compensating customers when things go wrong.
Our commitments
|
Our commitment |
Goal |
Plans to do more |
|---|---|---|
|
High standards of service |
We’ll adapt our services to make sure extra help customers receive the right support, that’s easy to understand. This includes providing efficient support during problems with your services and monitoring your satisfaction with these services to know how we can improve. See pages 22-26 of our strategy for more information. |
We’re implementing a new service for customers who experience problems with their sewerage services and need extra help and collaborating with partners to enhance the way we meet your needs during planned work. This includes delivering our streetworks training, designed in partnership with RNIB.
|
|
Inclusive by design |
We’ll use data and insights to ensure support is designed in a way suitable for a diverse range of customer needs, and test this by asking you about the ease of using our services. We’ll evidence this through accreditation with recognised bodies. See pages 27 - 32 of our strategy for more information. |
We’ll build a dedicated community of extra help customers, to help test new support services, and include literacy requirements within updates to our customer communications, to make sure these are accessible to as many people as possible. |
|
Identifying needs |
We train our colleagues to identify and support your individual needs, and when speaking to you, we focus on quality conversations and support. We aim to proactively increase awareness of support available through our work and targeted partnerships, including continuing our data sharing processes with the energy sector to make it easier for customers. See pages 22-25 of our strategy for more information. |
We’ll continue to raise awareness of support available using a range of communication channels. We’ll include visibility of this within online accounts and look for more opportunities to include information within ongoing and new customer campaigns. |
|
Recording needs |
We collect and store your data within robust processes, compliant with UK GDPR and best practice. We have structured processes on how we check your information is still up to date, including checking in with you every 2 years. See pages 22-25 of our strategy for more information. |
We’ll develop the use of prompting within your online account, to enable you to manage your needs and services more easily. We’ll also look to expand the number of customers we request feedback from following incidents, to help us receive as much feedback as possible to improve. |
Our work in the community
Getting out in nature
Research consistently highlights the positive link between spending time in outdoor spaces and improved mental health. As one of the largest landowners in Yorkshire, we recognise the importance of ensuring our outdoor spaces are inclusive and accessible to as many people as possible.
Visit our things to do section to learn about our different reservoirs and walking routes across Yorkshire. The page contains helpful information on the different facilities available at each site, so you can plan your visit based on what you need.
Increasing accessibility at our sites: our partnership with Experience Community
Experience Community specialises in providing inclusive outdoor activities and specialist equipment, such as mountain trikes, which allows people with disabilities to explore our reservoirs with ease. We’re delighted that our collaboration has facilitated greater access to our sites for individuals with disabilities. It’s given us valuable insights on enhancing our facilities to ensure a more accessible and enjoyable experience for a broader range of visitors.
Our partnership has also enabled us to identify opportunities to improve accessible walking paths for our customers at our sites. We’re continuing to work with them, and listen to customer and visitor feedback, to increase accessibility and make sure our spaces are safe and inclusive.
Supporting local initiatives and charities
For Christmas 2024, we supported a local Bradford food bank and led a Christmas gift appeal. We’ve also given them billing and employability support, so they can advise their communities.
We know how important supporting our communities with problems around mental health is. As part of Bradford’s City of Culture activities, our Occupational Health team have provided 2 days of Mental Health First Aid training for volunteers.
We also host regular community engagement events at our sites. This can include things like Random Acts of Kindness days, where we join up with our ranger team to offer advice and get creative with the outdoors. Follow us on social media to hear more about these events and get involved!