Resolving complaints about the quality of drinking water among water supply operators in the Czech Republic

As part of a project aimed at promoting tap water consumption, the first nationally representative survey in the Czech Republic (CR) was conducted in 2022 on how citizens drink tap and bottled water and what motivates them to do so. The survey, conducted among nearly 3,500 respondents aged 18–69 years, found that 81% of the citizens drink tap water daily (the proportion of the CR population supplied with drinking water from public supply is 95.6%). The main reasons why 12% of the citizens do not drink tap water at all or only exceptionally (several times a month) were bad taste (42%), smell or appearance of the water (8%) and health concerns (15%) (Zvěřinová et al. 2024). In comparison, a national survey in the USA in 2020 showed that 24% of the population never drank tap water (Junker & Carpenter 2021), while a similar survey in the Netherlands found that more than 95% of consumers had full confidence in the quality and safety of drinking water and routinely consumed it (Smeets et al. 2009).

A number of factors influence public perceptions of tap water safety and quality, such as infrastructure performance, news media coverage of water issues, socio-economic factors like education or income and communication with consumers (Pierce & Gonzalez 2017; Yang & Faust 2019; Weisner et al. 2020; Grupper et al. 2021; Junker & Carpenter 2021). One important aspect of this communication is information provision and complaint management. It is these aspects that were the focus of another investigation of the aforementioned Czech project, namely a questionnaire survey of water suppliers on how they communicate with their customers and consumers, and in particular how they handle complaints¹ about drinking water quality.

Although the law in the CR requires water suppliers to have a Complaints Code, it can generally be said that the culture of working with consumer complaints and using them as important feedback is not yet advanced in the CR, as it has long been or still is an underestimated area. There are only a few water suppliers that systematically develop their work with customers in our country, but even in these companies, the way complaints are evaluated is not always at a level that could be described as a well-functioning consumer complaint surveillance (CCS) system.

In some countries, e.g. in the USA, the UK or Australia (US EPA 2017; DWI 2020a, b; NHMRC 2022), drinking water quality regulators have already encouraged suppliers to implement CCS as a valuable process control to augment chemical and microbiological water quality monitoring more than 10 years ago, the European Union (EU) has only recently started to address this issue. The new Drinking Water Directive 2020/2184, as part of the expanded consumer information obligations, requires, among other things, that water suppliers who supply at least 10,000 m³/day or who service at least 50,000 people provide the public each year with a summary of consumer complaints received about aspects falling within the scope of the Directive and statistical data on these complaints, but only where available (EU 2020).

Following the transposition of the Directive, Czech legislation requires suppliers, with effect from 2025, to also publish data on complaints lodged by customers and statistical data on these complaints on their websites or in a manner customary in the locality. This requirement applies to all suppliers who operate water supply systems serving more than 50 inhabitants.

In order to understand the selection of respondents (see below in the methodology), it is necessary to give an overview of the drinking water supply system in the Czech Republic and the structure of the suppliers. The Czech Republic has 10.87 million inhabitants and, of these, 95.6% are supplied from public water supply systems where water is regularly inspected (the rest is supplied from private wells which are not subject to any mandatory checks). In 2022, there were a total of 4,079 water supply zones in operation, of which 3,805 were supplying up to 5,000 inhabitants and 3,278 less than 1,000 inhabitants (NIPH 2023). Thus, on the one hand, we have large water supply zones above 5,000 inhabitants, of which there are 274, supplying about 80% of the population, and, on the other hand, we have a high number of small supply zones. However, in the CR, relative to the size of the area and population, there is not only a high number of supplied zones but also a high number of suppliers. Currently, there are around 3,000 water suppliers (Duda & Bogdanova 2023), but the vast majority of them are small, non-professional suppliers (municipalities). The largest and most professional suppliers are associated with the Water Supply and Sewerage Association of the Czech Republic (SOVAK CR), and several smaller suppliers are also members of the association. Together, these suppliers provide water supply for almost 9 million inhabitants, which is about 90% of all the inhabitants connected to public water mains (SOVAK CR 2021).

The situation in the area of small-scale water suppliers is similar in the CR as in other countries with a large number of these resources. The suppliers are faced with a lack of qualified personnel and a lack of financial resources, but the regulatory requirements are practically the same as for large professional suppliers. We have systematically found higher non-compliance with water quality requirements among these suppliers (WHO 2011; Kot et al. 2015; Rickert et al. 2016). Foreign surveys showed that small suppliers have largely different priorities than building and improving relations and communication with consumers (DiCarlo et al. 2023).

A questionnaire for water suppliers was prepared, which contained 18 basic questions, and was (in addition to determining the size of the supplier) focused mainly on the way of registering and handling customer complaints, on the way of informing about water quality, on customer satisfaction surveys and on promoting tap water consumption. In order to be anonymous, the questionnaire was eventually only possible to fill in online in Google forms. The questions of the questionnaire, as well as the results in tabular form, are listed in the Supplementary material. For the purpose of this article, the answers related to complaint handling and ways of informing about water quality, which are closely related to complaints, were processed.

The way of distributing the questionnaire, or selecting respondents, was twofold and reflected the existence of two different groups of suppliers: large professional and small (mostly non-professional) ones. In the first stage, the questionnaire was sent to all water suppliers who are members of the SOVAK CR. There were 91 of them as of June 2021, when our investigation began (SOVAK CR 2021). Thanks to the fact that SOVAK CR was one of the guarantors of the project cooperating in implementation, the questionnaire was sent to the suppliers directly by the director of SOVAK CR, which probably increased its seriousness among the respondents. Fifty-nine completed questionnaires were returned from this group, so the respondent rate was almost 65%.

As far as small suppliers are concerned, it was decided to contact a sample of about 10% of them, i.e. 300 suppliers. These suppliers were sent a questionnaire or a request to fill it in online by the National Institute of Public Health. The response rate was very low (34 questionnaires) as expected, about 11%. Despite the low response rate, the responses received were mostly so expected or typical of small suppliers that it was decided to include them in the processing for illustrative purposes. It is, however, possible to distinguish from the presented results which responses concern small and large suppliers. Together, the set represents the responses of 93 suppliers. Table 1 provides an overview of respondents in categories by the number of people supplied.

Although the questionnaire was primarily anonymous, in one question respondents were asked if they would be willing to provide more detailed information on the recorded complaints and their settlement. This wish was granted by 13 larger water companies, which were subsequently visited and qualitative, in-person interviews were conducted on the subject with the heads of customer departments or drinking water technologists. The interviews ranged in length from 40 to 90 min. These companies supply between 19,000 and 1,330,000 inhabitants (median 230,000). The findings from this more detailed survey are used in the discussion.

Respondents provided data on the recorded numbers of complaints over a 3-year period on a yearly basis (2018, 2019 and 2020). An average of these 3 years was chosen to calculate the mean complaint frequency per 1,000 consumers per year.

A survey of US water suppliers conducted in 2021 showed much better results, with only 13% of the 504 respondents keeping no record of complaints (21.2% in the very small water supply category) and 4% unwilling to answer (DiCarlo et al. 2023). A similar finding was reached in a survey from the same country conducted 3 years earlier: only 19% of the suppliers kept no records (Evans & Carpenter 2019), however, this survey focused only on members of the American Water Works Association (AWWA). While the majority of large (59.1%) and very large (84.2%) suppliers keep records electronically, smaller suppliers keep records mostly in written form, as digital records are reported by only 49.4% of small and 33.3% of very small suppliers (DiCarlo et al. 2023).

In our survey, 27 suppliers (29%) responded positively to the question of whether they deal with the retrospective evaluation of all complaints as a whole. The reasons given for this evaluation were:

• feedback in relation to the performed maintenance of the distribution network;

• trend evaluation;

• incentives for improving water supply and communication (improving service quality);

• obtaining information on where there are more significant problems and where action is needed (operational, investment);

• verification of compliance with internal procedures for dealing with queries and complaints, especially how quickly they are handled;

• taking preventive organisational measures and infrastructure renewal planning.

The above-mentioned survey from the USA showed that 52.6% of the very large suppliers (supplying more than 100,000 inhabitants) evaluated the data, while among the others those who evaluated data were a minority, but always at least 30%, which is somewhat better than the CR result (DiCarlo et al. 2023).

A significant proportion of suppliers provide information once a year. Eighty-seven per cent of the suppliers update information on the quality of the water supplied once a year or more frequently.

Although the obligation to have a Complaints Code has been enshrined in law since 2002, as can be seen from the above breakdown of responses by the supplier size, a Complaints Code is standard or commonplace only for water companies supplying 50,000 inhabitants and above. The regulator (Ministry of Agriculture) also came across this shortcoming a few years ago, when it started systematically checking compliance with the requirements of Act 274/2001 Coll. (MoA 2001). And in doing so, it encountered not only the absence of these documents but also varying quality, to which it responded in 2023 by amending the legislation. Until now, regarding a Complaint Code, the law only stated that it should contain information on the scope and conditions of liability for defects, the manner and place of their application, including the rights and compensations arising from this liability. From 2025, a more precise definition applies, namely that the code must contain in particular the following information: (1) where a complaint can be lodged, (2) the form and methods of lodging a complaint, (3) the requirements for the content of the complaint, (4) the time limit for lodging a complaint, (5) the method of informing about how the complaint is handled, (6) the method of handling the complaint and (7) the competence of administrative authorities in the field of customer protection.

The Complaints Code is primarily a guide for consumers on how to proceed if they wish to complain about the quality of their water. However, it does not usually say anything about the internal complaint handling mechanism of the water producer or supplier. In our personal investigation of 13 companies, we found that the internal procedures or workflow mechanisms for handling complaints varied widely and were not based on a single standard, but had historically evolved differently according to the staffing conditions in each company. Only a minority of these companies (6) had this procedure available in writing in the form of a standard operating procedure or an internal directive, of which in one case it was not really followed in practice. In another case, the company asked for the interview date to be postponed by more than a month, and then, they openly told us that their way of dealing with complaints had been rather chaotic and that they had to first clarify for themselves how it should work properly. However, a certain dual- or multi-track approach to receiving and dealing with complaints was noted at several companies.

While the absence of a register of complaints in small suppliers is not surprising, it can be considered worrying in companies supplying tens of thousands of people (up to 50,000) and alarming in one even larger supplier. Since there are no significant differences in water quality in larger suppliers, we expected that the number of complaints would be more or less proportional to the number of people supplied. However, this was not the case, as shown by the mean complaint frequency, which varied by up to three orders of magnitude, while the differences for the six larger water companies in the USA, which supplied between 200,000 and 657,000 people, were no more than one order of magnitude (0.20–1.62) (Gallagher & Dietrich 2014). In our survey, the very low numbers for some large suppliers are not so much indicative of exceptionally good water quality and service to customers as they are indicative of an ‘exceptionally good’ complaint filter that evaluates complaints as unjustified or eliminates them outright. This is also confirmed by the experience of the Virginia Tech authors: ‘A high customer complaint frequency, in and of itself, should not be taken as an indication of a poorly run utility; rather, it should be an indicator of a utility that takes customer feedback seriously’ (Gallagher & Dietrich 2014).

The questionnaire did not specify exactly what respondents should consider a complaint. We assumed that this was clear, and furthermore, we considered the terms ‘claim’ and ‘complaint’ to be synonymous. However, our personal qualitative survey among 13 companies shows that the perception of a (legitimate) complaint definition by the suppliers differs a lot and is often incomparable. To give an example, for one supplier, a ‘water quality complaint’ is not the same as a ‘water quality claim’, because only a submission that points to unprofessional behaviour by a particular employee of the water company is considered a complaint. Whereas when the fact that the water coming out of the tap is brown is reported, it is considered a mere query about water quality, not a complaint. Similarly, another company only considers a submission to be a complaint or a claim if a customer specifically identifies it as a complaint or claim, but considers a communication about brown or smelly water to be ‘information’ or a ‘query’. And yet another company records as a complaint only those submissions for which it does not know the cause at the time of receipt and has to investigate. If there are complaints related to the repair of mains fault that the supplier already knows about and is dealing with, they are not recorded or even accepted (setting an automatic telephone response that the supplier knows about a certain fault and is dealing with it). Another company only records written complaints but not telephone complaints. And another company only records complaints received by the customer service department. If a customer calls outside office hours of this department and reaches e.g. the control room, this complaint is not recorded in the company's system. Another company, which listed 5–10 complaints per year in the questionnaire, later clarified to us that these are recorded ‘large’ complaints (more complex cases requiring investigation related to water sample collection and analysis), but that the total number of all complaints is estimated to be at least 10 times higher. Some suppliers record only so-called legitimate complaints (and it is not always clear what objective criteria are used to assess legitimacy – for example, one supplier does not recognise any complaints about chlorine odour as legitimate because it is considered a ‘natural’ feature of disinfected water), others record all complaints and out of that, they identify a subset of legitimate ones. For example, one large supplier reported the following numbers of complaints in 2019–2021 (with the number assessed as legitimate in brackets): 120 (7), 71 (6) and 100 (10). The relativity of the number of complaints is also demonstrated by the example of another company that redefined a ‘complaint’ and a ‘claim’ (as two different concepts) in 2020, so that until 2020 it had many complaints and few claims, from 2021 it is the opposite (one of the new categories of claims is ‘customer dissatisfaction with water quality’).

In countries where the regulator has required complaints to be recorded and reported for some time, they have already recognised the need for a clear definition. For example, the Drinking Water Inspectorate (England and Wales) defines it in a letter to suppliers (DWI 2022): instead of ‘complaints’, it requires recording of ‘consumer contacts about drinking water quality’, which it defines as follows: any communication about drinking water quality initiated by a consumer living or working in the area supplied by the water company including, but not limited to, phone, letter, fax, email, in-person, social media message or post for example Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, website request form and message left on a helpline. Among other things, this removes the problem of whether a complaint is legitimate or not, as not every consumer contact will be a ‘customer complaint’.

Czech Act No. 258/2000 Coll. requires water suppliers to ensure that up-to-date information on the quality of the drinking water supplied is publicly available on their websites or in a manner customary in the locality. A significant proportion of the suppliers (50%) provide information once a year or over a longer period of time. Thirty-nine per cent of the suppliers update information on the quality of the water supplied more frequently than once a year. This raises the question of whether a frequency of once a year is sufficient and can be considered up-to-date. The necessary frequency cannot be assessed without knowing the stability of the source water quality and the long-term results of indicators changing during the course of drinking water distribution. If the supplier has a well-established system for responding to water quality defects, including the fact that customers are informed and appropriate actions are taken (e.g. use restriction), and the water otherwise meets the parameters in the long term, then quality information updated once a year may serve its purpose well. The consumer can thus rely on water quality, make use of information about e.g. water hardness for maintenance and setup of household appliances, and otherwise not care about water quality – trust in it. This can be different for water systems, where water quality changes significantly during the year (e.g. due to rainfall, occasional connection of another source). Then, the information about quality once a year does not sufficiently describe the state of the water supply and it can, in extreme cases, be misleading if the supplier publishes only such analysis or quality overview that corresponds to the limits.

The subject of the debate should not only be how up-to-date the provided analyses of water are but also their extent. Although it is not explicitly stated, the law expects the provision of information about water quality in the range of all mandatory monitored indicators according to the implementing decree (of which there are about 60+ pesticides and their metabolites). However, by a brief check of the websites of selected large suppliers, we found that even some large suppliers list only a reduced range on their websites, about 20–25 indicators, usually leaving out metals and organic substances, including pesticides. If customers are interested in other indicators, they have to request them. It is true, however, that the interviews with suppliers showed that public interest in water quality is low (in terms of the number of enquiries about water quality unless there is an emergency). And the overwhelming majority of enquiries are about water hardness for technical reasons (setting up domestic appliances), which all suppliers report.

However, the provision of information on the website is only a passive form of communication, and it appears that for trust formation it is an active form that is important. The aforementioned US survey showed that respondents who recalled any communications from their utility in the past year were much more likely to give high ratings to safety, satisfaction and quality than respondents who did not recall hearing from their utility at all (Junker & Carpenter 2021).

The result of the Czech survey shows a significant deficiency in the field. Unlike other technical and manufacturing sectors, there is little use of process-based approaches to continuous improvement of product/service performance and quality or similar system-based approaches to corporate management in the waterworks sector. This is largely due to the aforementioned significant share of municipal suppliers (municipalities or entities established by municipalities). Commercial approaches and practices are not applied by this group of suppliers, not even those that lead to performance improvement. As a result, a lot of these entities limit their operation to fulfilling their statutory obligations. For the smallest suppliers, it is evident that even statutory obligations are not being sufficiently met, as shown by the results of the benchmarking of water asset owners and suppliers regularly carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA 2023).

The situation is also adversely affected by the fact that the operation of water mains is to a large extent a natural monopoly from the point of view of commercial competition – the vast majority of suppliers have guaranteed sales in the form of a medium- or long-term contract, or the owner of the water mains is also a supplier, thus without competition. In such a business environment, only professional suppliers who obtain or defend their contracts through tenders are generally trying to improve, i.e. obtain a commercial advantage. However, even these suppliers who submit annual reports to the owner of the water mains, including the number of complaints, may tend to report as few complaints as possible in these reports in order to have a good reputation for the next tendering procedure.

Is it therefore necessary for the principles of communication with the customer to be enshrined in legislation? Based on our own experience and the results of our survey, we believe that it is at least the essential points, and the details can be specified, for example, in the form of a methodological recommendation. Implementation of general principles and specific obligations into national legislation is prescribed by the amended European Drinking Water Directive, which makes it clear that the drafters of the directive consider information and good communication with customers to be important, but not yet sufficient. In addition to the information on water quality, which must be provided at least once a year, there is also an obligation to provide summary information on customer complaints; the directive provides for this to be introduced at least for companies supplying drinking water to more than 50,000 customers. However, this is where the good intentions are skating on thin ice. If the recording and evaluation of complaints serve only as feedback to the water supplier, it is perhaps possible to criticise the very different practices found and call for their improvement. However, if the number of complaints published is to be used by consumers as an objective indicator of the quality of water supplied, or by the media to compare the performance of services, and the quality of water supplied between suppliers, there is a danger that we will draw a very false picture from the published data and draw incorrect conclusions that the worst suppliers are those who honestly record and publish all complaints. For these purposes, it would first be necessary to harmonise the definition of a complaint or claim (about water quality) and the rules for recording them. This will prevent a lot of media noise and misunderstandings.

For these reasons, NIPH and CzWA have prepared a methodology for the Czech Ministry of Agriculture on good practices in communicating with consumers, including complaint handling (Kožíšek et al. 2023). The methodology provides water suppliers the guidance of good practices in the area of communication with their customers or consumers. The purpose is, on the one hand, the correct fulfilment of legal obligations on providing information resulting from Acts No. 258/2000 Coll. and 274/2001 Coll., on the other hand, designing other voluntary information options and activities that help to increase the trust of customers/consumers in the services of drinking water suppliers and in the safety of the water itself.

While this methodology encourages recording complaints and working systematically with them, it does not give precise instructions for the statistical processing of these data in order to interpret them in terms of their meaning, spatial and temporal dimensions, predictive power, etc., and last but not least their visualisation. In this regard, interested parties must turn to the literature, which offers a range of modelling approaches and methods for both computation and visualisation (e.g. Montenegro et al. 2009; Mounce et al. 2012; Dietrich et al. 2014; Gallagher & Dietrich 2014; Bouchraki et al. 2021; Ta et al. 2022). This will naturally be particularly relevant to larger suppliers, as the small ones usually do not even have a sufficient number of complaints for statistical processing (DiCarlo et al. 2023).

At this point, it is worth mentioning that some countries go so far in their customer friendliness that they try to involve customers not only in water quality and safety (CCS) monitoring issues but even in the decision-making process regarding water pricing (Hendry 2016) or in the benchmarking of water companies (de Goede et al. 2016; Molinos-Senante et al. 2016).

Tap drinking water for public use is provided to almost 96% of the population of the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, a certain percentage of customers do not believe in the safety of drinking water and refuse to consume it. At the same time, the quality of drinking water supplied in the Czech Republic is strictly regulated and monitored, and it can fully match the quality in developed countries of the world. It should, therefore, also be in the interest of drinking water suppliers that their product is trusted by customers, as required by the Bonn Water Charter (IWA 2004). For any other food commodity, it goes without saying that its producer promotes quality and other benefits.

Working with complaints and claims is one of the pillars of the so-called customer-focused approach. A negative reaction of the customer should always be examined and it should be ascertained whether the dissatisfaction is justified and whether it is not a system fault, the repetition of which can be prevented by modification of processes. Failure to use this type of feedback can lead to problems to be repeated, dissatisfaction to deepen and in relation to the quality of water the confidence in the safety of tap water to be lost. Similar to the risk assessment and risk management of drinking water supply systems, the promotion of tap water quality and safety and systematic work with complaints has the potential to significantly improve the level of operation of water supplies in the Czech Republic. What is however needed to use the potential is the correct adoption and desired use of these modern approaches; forced compliance with a legal obligation at the level required by the relevant legislation will of course not bring the change. The involvement of all employees is also important. In the conditions of the Czech Republic, this will often require a time-consuming change in approaches or even generational renewal. But the industry is clearly moving in this direction and education among suppliers is necessary, not only provided by professional associations but also by the state or national regulator.

The study was supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (the project TL03000252 ‘Tap Water or Bottled Water: Barriers and Motivations to Consume Drinking Water’). The research funding agency had no influence on the study design; the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; the writing of the report or the decision of where to submit the article for publication.

All relevant data are included in the paper or its Supplementary Information.

The authors declare there is no conflict.