Focus: Build foundational awareness, draw on past insights, understand current customer sentiment, validate current outcome performance, identify baseline service priorities, and develop campaign resources. 

Key Activities & Engagement Channels 

• Performance Accountability – Customer Assessment Panel (“Did we deliver?”): Report back transparently on performance under the current pricing period to the Customer Assessment Panel to build credibility.  

• Broad-Scale Community Survey: Planning for the Annual Regional Water Alliance customer insights survey gathering sentiment on water reliability, billing preferences, and environmental sustainability. 

• Validate current outcomes: We will engage early and draw on insights from the past, by analysing all available qualitative data including customer comments and feedback received across all channels during this pricing period. Validation Research Report. 

• Early First Nations Dialogue: Early, culturally safe conversations with Traditional Owner Corporations and the First Nations community to understand values around land and waterway stewardship, removing barriers to participation and investing in developing relationships. 

Focus: Insights from validation research will be used to refine Westernport Water’s engagement approach, confirm and deliver the customer and community engagement program, identify priority issues and emerging customer concerns, and inform the annual customer satisfaction survey.   

Key Activities & Engagement Channels 

• Performance Accountability (“Did we deliver?”): Report back transparently on performance under the current pricing period to build credibility. 

• Broad-Scale Community Survey: Annual Regional Water Alliance customer insights survey gathering sentiment on water reliability, billing preferences, and environmental sustainability. 

• Engaging First Nations people: We will engage diverse Aboriginal voices on consumer issues. This will include First Nations customers/consumers and Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations providing customer support or advocacy to the community. 

• Traditional Owner Engagement: We will invest in strengthening relationships and engage with Traditional Owners as holders of rights and interests in relation to land and waterways, particularly on matters relating to land and water management. 

• Vulnerability & Hardship Focus Groups: Collaboration with financial counsellors, local community support agencies, and vulnerable customer advocates to better understand the challenges. 

• Commercial & Developer Roundtables: Targeted discussions with major commercial accounts, developers, and trade waste customers on capital infrastructure requirements and new customer contributions (NCC) charges. 

Focus: Unpack complex choices, trade-offs between service levels and bills, and deep consultation with targeted groups. Together, these activities will support the development and testing of a draft customer outcomes framework. 

Key Activities & Engagement Channels 

• Customer Deliberative Panels: Engage with representative panels of residential and business customers to evaluate price vs. service level scenarios. 

• Dedicated First Nations & Traditional Owner Engagement: Include tangible self-determined outcomes that reflect Traditional Owner priorities, describing how Traditional Owner priorities have or have not been reflected in the pricing submission 

• Vulnerability & Hardship Focus Groups: Collaboration with financial counsellors, local community support agencies, and vulnerable customer advocates to co-design hardship programs and tariff structures. 

• Getting to Fair Interviews: Targeted stakeholder meetings that explore perceptions of fairness, priorities and trade-offs related to service levels, investment and pricing. They provide qualitative insights that help shape customer outcomes and inform decision-making. 

• Commercial & Developer Roundtables: Test proposals with developers about new customer contributions in accordance with our NCC Project Plan. and trade waste customers on capital infrastructure requirements and charges. 

• Use engagement insights to inform the draft outcomes we propose to deliver in the price submission.