In the spotlight: Jennifer Thomas

Can you tell us a little bit about your role at Welsh Water?

My role involves providing consolidated bills for larger organisations and contacting customers who haven’t paid their bills. Often those customers are sole traders who may be struggling so my primary aim is to get through to them and negotiate a payment plan to get them back on track with their debt.

I think there is a myth out there that if you own your own business, you can afford bills but that isn’t always the case. We pride ourselves on taking a holistic approach to customers in general, no matter their background or situation.

We do understand some customers can’t always afford to pay, even business customers. Not everyone can and everyone has been affected by the cost-of-living crisis in very different ways. It’s important for us to do the right thing for our business customers.

How do you work with businesses within your role?

It mainly involves speaking to businesses to try and negotiate payment for overdue water bills or find out what’s going on. For these customers I look after them like an account manager. I regularly have to do a lot of investigation and liaise with other teams within Welsh Water to get to the bottom of why they’re not paying.

Sometimes there’s a really good reason why the bills have gone unpaid; such as a premises has been sold to another business and we haven’t been notified. Sometimes it can be as simple as we have the wrong contact details and they need to be updated.

It could even be that the customer has had a leak and they’re not sure whether it’s our responsibility or theirs – and they’ve made a decision not to pay whilst the issue is investigated. In those cases I’ll arrange for one of our team to go out and see what’s going on. They’ll then report back their findings so we can resolve the issue.

Can you give us an example of how you’ve helped a business customer recently with the cost-of-living crisis?

Last Thursday I spoke to a gentleman who runs a takeaway shop and hadn’t been paying his water bill for a while so he was in £500 worth of debt. He had a text message from us chasing payment so rang us up.

As we were chatting, he mentioned to me on the phone that he was on an affordability tariff for his home address. An affordability tariff is something we offer for household customers who are vulnerable. In his case, his home water bills were capped due to a disability in the property.

The reason he hadn’t been paying on his commercial account was because he was struggling to pay his business and home address at the same time due to the rising cost-of-living.

To simplify everything for him, I set up a direct debit that covered both his home and business account and spread the cost. I also added notes on his customer account about the affordability challenges so other colleagues are aware that it’s not a ‘won’t pay’ but a 'struggling to pay’ situation.

He was really appreciative that I’d gone through everything with him and put his mind at rest. He even said that he’d been dreading ringing us up. It breaks my heart when I hear customers saying that – we are genuinely here to help.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I’m admittedly a bit of a nerd. In my spare time I go to Geek Retreat in town on Friday nights with my partner. We’ll play tabletop games and meet different people and talk to them which can be really fun.

I’m an avid gamer as well – if I’m really stressed after work, my Xbox is the only thing that stops my brain thinking because I’m focusing on a different puzzle and it takes my mind away.

I also enjoy walking my mum’s dog as she only lives round the corner, swimming, shopping and watching films at the cinema.