Customer Engagement Services for Price Submission 2023

⁠⁠⁠South East Water is one of Melbourne’s three state-owned metropolitan water retailers. We provide water, sewerage, trade waste and recycled water services for residents and businesses in Melbourne’s south east, located in the state of Victoria, Australia.

We service more than 1.75 million people including more than 743,000 residential water customers and more than 55,000 non-residential water customers.

For further information regarding South East Water please visit www.southeastwater.com.au.

South East Water is looking to appoint a suitable, qualified consultant to provide engagement services to understand what matters to our customers and community as a whole, to input into our 2023 Price Submission.

The customer engagement, as part of the Price Submission, is guided by the Essential Services Commission’s (the Commission) Pricing Framework and Approach, PREMO. The PREMO incentive approach gives water businesses strong incentives to deliver better value for customers, through focusing on five elements: performance, risk, engagement, management and outcomes. The Commission wants water businesses to undertake more effective customer engagement, to engage with customers earlier in the planning process and more deeply on matters that are significant to the services received by customers and to the prices that they pay. Price Submissions by water businesses must demonstrate the influence of this engagement on proposed services and prices and need to understand high level customer service priorities, explore trade-offs between keeping customers’ bills affordable while investing in the environment and service improvements and iteratively provide feedback on research to customers and test initial positions.

Continuing on from the engagement undertaken in 2016-17 as part of the 2018 Price Submission, South East Water wants to embark on a significant and broad reaching piece of customer engagement to understand what matters to them in terms of service outcomes and prices.