Assessing Innovation in Customer Engagement for PR19

Price Reviews

One of the ways in which we deliver our duties is to set the price, investment and service package that water customers receive. This includes controlling the prices that water companies can charge their customers and is called a "Price Review". We currently carry out a review of these price limits every five years. We intend to consult on the way we set price controls (our 'methodology') in July 2017, and set final price limits in December 2019 which will affect water bills from 2020. As we are working towards delivering our decisions by December 2019, we are currently within the period of "PR19".

As part of the PR19 process, water companies develop business plans for the services they plan to deliver for the period 2020-2025 and submit these to us to review. The review contains tests for quality in certain areas. For PR14, this process was called a risk-based review (RBR).

The overall objective of the project is to identify the best way for Ofwat to assess innovation in the customer engagement techniques used by water companies to create their business plans for the period 2020-2025.

We require the Contractor to achieve this by carrying out the Key Tasks listed below.

Scope of Work and Key Tasks

The Contractor will: 1) Provide context / background information on assessing innovation in customer engagement.

2) Identify case studies and/or examples of the latest best practice in innovative customer engagement techniques in the water sector, or other closely comparable sectors.

3) Develop a framework that Ofwat can apply to assess the quality and extent of innovation in customer engagement reflected in water companies' business plans as part of the RBR process for PR19.

4) Produce a framework that Ofwat can apply to evaluate the quality and acceptability of experiments / pilots / tests including Randomised Control Trials (RCTs), which companies have carried out to understand their customers' priorities, needs, requirements and behaviours.