What a water bill taught a young survey analyst

The first survey I designed asked water customers in a Walloon municipality how satisfied they were with their bills. Most said they were satisfied. A month later the utility sent its annual reconciliation, and complaints tripled. I was twenty-three, an analyst at Calmerot Research in Brussels, and the gap between those two results has shaped most of my working life. A satisfaction score records how people feel before they know the number. Trust is decided afterwards.

I grew up in La Louvière, in a family that spoke Italian at the table and French everywhere else; my grandparents had come from Abruzzo to work in the Hainaut coalfield. I studied business engineering at the Mosanvelle School of Management, graduating in June 1998, and joined Calmerot that September. Over four years I ran customer studies for utilities, insurers and a mobile operator. I learnt to write a question that did not lead the respondent, and to report a result a client did not want to hear.

In 2002 that mobile operator, Telvaroche, hired me into its retention team. Belgian mobile customers moved freely at the end of a contract, and the company wanted to know why they went. I built the analysis that linked departures to particular events: a roaming charge after a holiday, a price change at renewal, a complaint left unanswered. The pattern held across every segment. People left after a surprise, not after a high price they had understood. By 2008 I managed eleven people and a renewal programme that had reduced monthly contract churn from 2.3 to 1.6 per cent.

I moved to Ambrevelle in April 2008. The supplier had begun selling to households after the Walloon and Brussels markets opened in 2007, and it needed customers quickly. I ran household acquisition for five years and grew our contracts from 95,000 to 210,000. I also ended our use of door-to-door sales agencies in 2011, after complaint data showed that contracts signed at the door were cancelled three times as often as those signed online. Sales colleagues argued that I was giving up our fastest channel. I was, and growth slowed for a year.

In 2013 I left to become commercial and marketing director of Soléverne, a network of independent solar installers. The Walloon solar market had contracted sharply after a generous support scheme was cut back, and installers who had sold panels on payback promises were facing angry customers. I spent five years helping 140 partner firms sell heat pumps, batteries and maintenance as well as panels, and rewriting every savings estimate the network published. I learnt how an installer earns a living, why a referral fee changes what gets recommended, and how long a broken promise stays in a neighbourhood.

Ambrevelle asked me back in March 2018 as director of marketing and customer insight. I rebuilt our research function, introduced a monthly measure of bill surprise drawn from complaints and contact reasons, and started the partner-installer channel that now brings us solar and heat-pump households. By the end of 2021 we held 452,000 contracts.

I became chief marketing officer in January 2022, weeks before wholesale prices made every assumption in our plan obsolete. The decisions of the next two years are set out on the Impact page: raising advance payments early, withdrawing a green claim, and handling the end of a temporary social tariff through personal contact. Each was argued over in the executive committee. In each I accepted a measurable commercial cost because I believed the alternative would cost more of our customers' trust later. I was not always right about the size of that cost, and I say where I misjudged it.

I lead through evidence that other functions can check. My team shares its customer research with trading, finance, collections and customer service, and I ask those colleagues to challenge it. I hold marketing accountable for complaints and settlement-bill shocks as well as for sign-ups, which has made some of our campaigns smaller and most of them clearer. When I present to our board, customer-treatment results sit beside commercial ones, including the measures that make my own function look worse.

I have not held a directorship. I would like to take what I know about consumer trust under price pressure to a regulated business outside energy supply, where the same questions arise in another form: how a price change is explained, who is protected when a household struggles, and whether a marketing claim would survive a regulator's reading. I expect to learn more than I contribute in my first year, and I would say so plainly to the chair.

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