CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT FOR WATER UTILITIES: MARKETING URBAN WATER SUPPLY

Introduction, The Marketing Mix, Value Proposition, Internal Marketing, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Conclusions

Customer Experience Management for Water Utilities provides a practical framework and guidelines for water utilities to become more focused 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 cannot be applied to monopolistic water utilities without modification. This book develops a tailored marketing mix for water utilities to assist them in providing customer-centric services. The water utility marketing mix emphasises the value proposition, internal marketing, service quality and customer relationships as points of interest for customer-centric water utilities. The following chapters of the book explain each of these four dimensions of the marketing mix.

The third chapter presents a template for developing value propositions to assist water utilities in positioning their service. This model is based on an intimate understanding of the needs and wants of each customer segment and related service offering.

The next chapter discusses internal marketing, which involves using managerial interventions to improve the way processes add value for customers. This chapter discusses the potential for tensions in engineering and science-oriented organisations with being customer focussed and proposes some methods to resolve these tensions.

The customer experience is a complex phenomenon that is difficult to quantify. The book proposes a method to measure the experience of the customer, based on service quality theory and psychometric statistics.

The last part of the book describes the management of customer relationships from both a theoretical and practical perspective.

Customer Experience Management for Water Utilities is one of the first books that views urban water supply from a marketing perspective, which gives it a unique perspective on an industry otherwise dominated by technical discussions. It 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.