about irish water
Irish Water is Ireland’s national water utility. It’s responsible for the operation of all public water and wastewater services including the management of national water and wastewater assets, maintenance of the water/wastewater system, investment and planning, managing capital projects, customer care and billing.
1. The challenge
Established in 2013, Irish Water delivers 1.7 billion litres of water a day to homes and business and safely returns wastewater to the environment. The Water Services Strategic Plan set out that a key objective for Irish Water was ‘to establish both customer trust and a reputation for excellent service’. In meeting this objective, the organisation is highly dependent on local authorities, contractors and contact centre agents.
2. How W5 helped
We understood that Irish Water needed to be able to understand the customer experience ecosystem, measure the parts, appreciate the dependencies and, crucially, share this information across the organisation to empower all parts of the organisation with timely, actionable and easy to understand insights. We designed and built a ‘Voice of the Customer’ programme (VoC) that established a clear link for staff and all external stakeholders between behaviours, systems, processes and customer reaction

3. Results
Satisfaction, ease and sentiment scores on key journeys all improved in the first 18 months by 45%. Instrumental to achieving the improvements was the establishment of the Irish Water CX Board and CX Action Task Force. They are responsible for actioning improvements suggested by the VoC programme and are made up of key stakeholders from across the business, ensuring strong governance and coordination around customer experience.
What Irish Water said about the project
"The Voice of the Customer programme has resulted in valuable insights being shared with us on a monthly basis. Before the implementation of the programme, we were developing continuous improvement initiatives in the hope that they would improve the customer service experience. Since the implementation of the programme, we are armed with evidence-based insights, which direct us to specific checkpoints in the customer journey. Our continuous improvements initiatives are now targeted at the most appropriate activities, resulting in a much-improved customer experience."
Yvonne Harris
Head of Customer Operations, Irish Water
RELATED INSIGHTS
Visit our resources hub
Access now
OUR SOLUTIONS
Want to discuss a customer experience project?
Clients we've helped
We helped AIB Merchant Services to significantly reduce churn by rolling out our award-winning customer-centricity programme.
Read their story
We worked alongside Allianz supporting the development of a road map to customer centricity.
Read their story
We've worked with Gas Networks Ireland since 2007 measuring their performance and providing the insight that led them to deliver an award-winning service.
Read their story
The W5 team coached and trained ESB Networks in CX strategy and implementation to help them overcome key challenges and identify opportunities to improve experiences.
Read their story
Our customer journey mapping for Dublin Bus put its customers at the centre of operations and helped to breed a unified customer-first culture.
Read their story
By focusing on the voice of the customer, we enabled Jameson Whiskey to understand the impact of its visitor experience and boost NPS.
Read their story
We designed and built a VoC programme to help Irish Water better understand customer behaviours and carry out continuous CX improvement initiatives.
Read their story
Our CX strategy design and customer feedback programme helped eir to improve NPS, reduce churn rate and boost customer acquisition.
Read their story
By mining data to unveil deep customer insights, we helped Norwegian to address key customer issues, leading to the airline winning a Best Customer Service award.
Read their story
Start the conversation
Get in touch with the W5 team about customer experience management or chat with us online.