Scottish Water’s Fiona Templeton was awarded the title of Customer Experience Professional Woman of the Year at the UK Customer Experience Awards 2013.
Here Fiona, Customer Experience Manager for Scottish Water, reflects on her Award and her passion for her work.
“Customers of Scottish Water have been a big part of my life for some time now. I chose to work in Customer Service as I truly believed we could deliver improvements for our customers and I wanted to contribute to a change that I knew Scottish Water needed to make.
Scottish Water was formed from three very diverse businesses back in 2002, each with their own cultures and priorities all focused on keeping the huge asset network working. When formed there was a significant focus on pulling together the three organisations to deliver consistency of services across Scotland with this focus it meant that for some time there was little opportunity to think about how we were delivering services to customers.
As Scottish Water matured, I with my team have sought out every opportunity to raise awareness of our customers. Getting the customers voice heard in the board room and at senior level has been critical but it is equally important to spend time listening to and engaging with my colleagues who spend each day with customers investigating and resolving their issues. Many initiatives and ideas for improvement have come through these conversations.
I talked about some of my personal qualities in the award submission; I am with out a doubt an opportunist and have sought out and taken advantage of the opportunities that have come my way to talk to people across Scottish Water about what customers are saying; I would say that I have always had a quiet determination to be heard and to help ensure that Scottish Water realise its full potential on behalf of customers; I have been tactical in securing an incredible team that help ensure that the whole business gets the information and support that it needs, they ‘my work family’ are all passionate about their roles and talented customer service professionals in their own rights; finally I am also genuinely passionate about what we do in Customer Experience and I think that it does make a difference when you truly do believe in your vision, your team and yourself – people do stop and listen.
Where are we now; we have attendance at customer focus groups from CEO through to our Regulators who all now have a genuine interest in hearing what customers have to say about our services, our CEO takes every opportunity to talk about customers and what they are saying, we have established an Institute of Customer Service accredited training programme creating customer service professionals across our service teams at all levels, we have transformed our complaints team in to a Service Review team who deliver solutions for customers as well as insights on improvements for the business. But the big thing for me is that customers and customer satisfaction is a hot topic that everyone is talking about.
When you are compiling an award submission it gives you the opportunity to reflect on your achievements I think that what we have achieved in Scottish Water, in an industry that was so focused on assets to being one that now genuinely cares about services to customers is an incredible achievement and I am proud to have been part of it and really appreciate the recognition for the UK Customer Experience Awards. The great thing though is that I know we have more to do!