Our Water, Our Voice

Why are we doing this?

Sydney Water is Australia’s largest water utility, with nearly 5.3 million customers, who naturally have different lifestyles, priorities, and concerns. We need to regularly check-in with our customers to ensure we’re hearing these diverse voices. 

On top of that, we are always developing and evolving our short- and long-term business plans to meet the needs of our communities. These help define our work and priorities. We can’t do that without aligning with our customers' expectations.

This work will also be used to determine how much our customers will pay for water until the end of the decade. Sydney Water’s current price period ends in 2025 and we need to plan for our next submission to our regulator, IPART, which is due in 2023-24. IPART’s final determination sets the maximum price Sydney Water charges customers for water, wastewater, and stormwater services.

So, the submission we lodge to IPART needs to have our customer’s insights, expectations, and priorities at its foundation, as we want our customers paying a fair price for a fair service, and what they get from their bills to be shaped by them.

How are we listening?

We’ve embarked on a 12-month listening exercise with research specialist Kantar Public which will reach thousands of customers across the Greater Sydney region.

Our engagement will be inclusive and entail deliberative forums, focus groups, workshops, one-on-one in-depth interviews, online sessions, and surveys.

The first survey has now closed and we have commenced Phase 2 of our engagement.

We are ensuring we are reaching all corners of the community, including First Nations people, multicultural communities, people with a disability and those who are financially vulnerable and local businesses we serve. 

We also engage regularly with our Customer & Community Reference Group, an independent group of customer representatives and experts who review our research findings and provide input into our plans and regulatory submissions, to ensure that they are in the best interests of our customers.

Where does the feedback go and what will it influence?

The Our Water, Our Voice project will provide the customer insights Sydney Water needs to inform our three key regulatory submissions. These submissions include:

1. Our price submission to IPART
2. Our operating licence and customer contract
3. Our Long-Term Capital and Operational Plan (LTCOP)

We have also committed to using the feedback to help influence and build our long-term business plans and our enterprise plans.

The rich insights won’t be used just once but drawn on multiple times.

We will keep customers updated on this webpage at the end of each of the four phases, to relay the high-level findings and insights from our engagement sessions – so you are a part of the journey.

More information

We will keep customers updated on this webpage at the end of each of the four phases, to relay the high-level findings and insights from our engagement sessions – so you are a part of the journey.

If you would like to contribute or get involved in our research activities, then please contact SW.Strategic.Engagement@kantar.com.

A full report outlining our four-phase approach to our customer engagement will be available shortly.