Water companies probably measure domestic customer satisfaction more than almost any other regulated industry. There are C-MeX scores, complaint numbers, response times, Guaranteed Standards Scheme payments, and plenty of regulatory reporting requirements designed to show how customers feel about the service they receive.
Yet trust in the sector continues to fall. Headlines about pollution, rising bills, sewage spills and service failures have left many people sceptical about water companies, even when those companies are reporting OK performance scores. And its more prevalent in the current climate of drought and restrictions.
That gap between “we are performing ok” and “the public doesn’t trust us” is worth looking at, because it suggests the industry isn’t measuring badly. Its measuring the wrong moment.
The Problem with Measuring a Single Moment
Most trust-related measures are taken at a specific point in time. A customer satisfaction survey after an interaction. A compliance score for a particular year. A compensation payment triggered by an individual service failure.
Those measures are useful, but trust doesn’t work like that. Trust builds slowly and it can disappear slowly too. Someone might say their complaint was resolved and give a positive survey response but still come away feeling less confident in the company than they were before. Months later, when another issue arises, that underlying lack of confidence is still there.
Other industries have faced the same challenge. Healthcare providers, banks and airlines have all learned that looking only at what customers think immediately after an interaction doesn’t tell the whole story. The more important question is whether confidence returns over time or simply fades into silence.
Why Silence Can Be Misleading
There’s a natural tendency to assume that if complaint levels are stable, everything is fine. But silence can mean different things. It might mean a customer’s issue was genuinely fixed and they’re happy with the outcome. Equally, it might mean they’ve lost faith that raising a complaint will make any difference and have simply stopped trying. Those two situations look the same on a dashboard, but they tell completely different stories about trust. For a sector that faces as much public scrutiny as water does, that’s an important distinction.
There’s also a question about who is being measured. Water accounts are typically held by one named individual, but when there’s a service problem it’s rarely only that person who is affected. Family members, housemates and other occupants all experience the impact too. When surveys, communications or support options are built around the account holder alone, companies may be missing a significant part of the customer experience.
What Water Matters Is Telling Us
CCW’s Water Matters survey provides one of the clearest views of how customers feel about the sector. After fifteen years of consistent tracking, it remains one of the most valuable benchmarks available. The latest report from May 2026, shows trust continuing to decline. The overall trust score across England and Wales fell from 6.28 to 6.07 out of 10, with thirteen water companies seeing their scores fall. Only 44% of customers felt their charges were fair, while 63% felt their bill was affordable. Trust scores ranged from 7.02 to 4.74.
These findings matter because they show that trust is not simply a challenge for a handful of poorly performing companies. The trend is now visible across much of the sector. Affordability, value for money, environmental concerns and confidence in service delivery are all influencing how customers feel.
The great strength of Water Matters is its consistency. Fifteen years of comparable data make it possible to say with confidence whether public trust is rising or falling and to identify the themes behind those movements. Annual tracking provides a sector-wide comparison of customers and companies, but that is only part of the story. A yearly reading shows that trust has moved, it wasn’t designed to show the shape of how it moved – what happened to a household’s confidence in the weeks after a specific pollution incident, bill shock, or service failure, long before the next survey wave ever reaches them.
Turning Insight into Action
Water Matters does a great job of showing that trust is falling, but the real challenge is understanding what’s driving that decline for each individual company. That’s where a data-led consultancy can help. By bringing together Water Matters results, C-MeX scores, complaints data, operational performance and customer feedback, it’s possible to move beyond headline numbers and pinpoint the issues having the biggest impact on trust. The goal isn’t more measurement, it’s better understanding. Maybe tracking customers’ experiences over longer periods, understanding who is and isn’t being reached, and treating a lack of feedback as something worth investigating rather than a sign that everything is fine.
The companies that start asking those longer-term questions may uncover issues that today’s performance measures are simply not designed to spot.
And finally, to us this seems a really important issue at the moment. At a time when the sector is trying to minimise water wastage and encouraging customers to use less so that everyone continues to have a reliable supply, trust can be the critical decision factor when a customer decides to act or not. If you would value a discussion on trust or would like an independent view on what your data is showing, then we’d be happy to help.
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