November 07, 2025
Medallia Helps Northumbrian Water Elevate Customer Experience for 4 Million Users
Northumbrian Water Group has partnered with Medallia on a project aiming to modernise how the utility company listens to, understands and serves its 4 million customers.
Northumbrian Water provides supply and sewerage services to 2.7 million households in the North East of England (under the Northumbrian Water brand) and water services to 1.8 million customers across Essex & Suffolk (under Essex & Suffolk Water). With sustainability and customer experience rising on its agenda, the utility sought a robust “voice of the customer” platform to bolster its regulatory standing and deepen engagement.
Within three months of the deal, Medallia rolled out its Experience Cloud across the utility’s touch-points covering contact centre operations, field work, case management and digital channels. As a result, the utility was able to capture insights from online platforms and apps, in addition to traditional call-centre feedback. As Medallia notes, its platform supports end-to-end experience management by putting the customer’s perspective at the centre and helping organisations act on what they hear.
Customers Expect More from Their Utilities
This news comes at a time when the water industry in the UK is under growing pressure to step up its customer-experience game. As one Harvard Business Review white paper notes: “Customers expect more from their utilities… and utilities can no longer delay marshalling one of their greatest assets – their data – to provide a compelling CX.”
Northumbrian Water has seen meaningful results so far: survey reach has expanded beyond the previous 30 percent sample to a broader audience, engagement scores now consistently top 9.2 out of 10, and the platform’s text analytics and sentiment-analysis tools are helping the company spot recurring pain points and resolve them faster. The use of Medallia’s so-called recovery loop tools is helping reduce customer effort and improve trust.
Medallia’s VP Retail Executive Advisor Mike Debnar recently told CXM that the evolution in CX management is happening: “For the longest time, we’ve been in the business of collecting feedback from customers and then reacting to that feedback — often well after the experience happened. Now, what we’re trying to do is actually take more action in the moment, so it’s becoming much more action-oriented.”
Furthermore, Northumbrian Water has brought in Medallia Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) and linked it with its Experience Cloud deployment. This enables the utility to analyse digital journeys such as websites and apps, and combine them with operational feedback to deliver a richer customer view. With support from Medallia’s experience-advisors, the company is fine-tuning its online flows and making self-service simpler and more intuitive.
With customer expectations rising rapidly, the time for companies to ask not just “Are we compliant?” but “Are we trusted?” has arrived.
