Making water transparent

The Challenge

Even at the best of times, customers tend not to think about their water service until something goes wrong. But with nationwide news coverage of wastewater, trust in the industry as a whole is at a historic low. South West Water, having a vast rural pipe network, miles of beautiful coastline, and an influx of visitors each summer, found itself in the public’s crosshairs. 

To rebuild trust amongst their customers, South West Water needed to demonstrate a commitment to improvement, and importantly to being far more transparent around their plans and actions to solve the issues at hand.

This project was about evolving the South West Water brand to give them a way of communicating about their plans for change in a way that was less corporate, more modern, and - most importantly of all - more human. 

The Solution

With digital channels at the heart of the business’ customer engagement strategy, a redesigned website acted as our jumping-off point and the flagship element of the new and improved brand strategy.  The aim? To turn the website into a strategic business asset. A platform where South West Water could demonstrate radical transparency and humility around its shortcomings, provide a modern, easy-to-use account management platform for billpayers, and start to rebuild trust by building a platform which allowed them to communicate the contributions and improvements they are making within the region.

true conducted workshops with client teams to map out South West Water’s user types and designed workshops to identify their characteristics, goals, and needs from the site. We used web analytics and historic survey data to understand the way they currently felt about the brand and used the site, with the aim of identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement.

 We then followed this up with direct user research to gain richer insights and gain more detailed insights on the pain points. Surfacing the right content at the right moment - without interrupting people completing tasks - and presenting it in a genuinely engaging way, would be at the heart of the design challenge. 

To build trust in South West Water, we focused the brand strategy around their employees: demonstrating that through their employees they had a deep understanding of the local area and were stitched into the fabric of the region. 

For the rebrand, that meant a greater emphasis on editorial content, to tell the stories of those South West Water staff and the work they’re doing as custodians of the South West. It also meant a new approach to photography and using more evocative shots to capture the spirit of the people of the region and the beauty of its natural environment. The re-brand was underpinned by a content-led approach and new brand palette to help South West Water better communicate stories of the value and action being taken, and how they support excellence in service, environmental and community focused projects.   

The site was built using the Optimizely CMS platform, applying the new brand guidelines to a component-based design system.