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

ABSTRACT According to a survey, 12% of the Czech population does not drink tap water. The main reasons given are poor aesthetic quality of water (42%) and health concerns (15%). The latter reason does not appear to be objectively based and must therefore have other causes, such as how well consumers are informed and how effectively their complaints are dealt with. Therefore, a questionnaire survey was carried out among water supply operators focusing on these aspects. The survey showed that only 62% of them have a Complaints Code and that only 53% of the operators record complaints about water quality. The number of recorded complaints per 100,000 consumers varied by several orders of magnitude. This difference was not only due to different water quality but also primarily due to different efficiency of complaint collection and, most importantly, to very different internal definitions of complaints. Under the new EU Drinking Water Directive, water suppliers will be obliged to publish information on complaints, but without the term ‘complaint’ being defined. If the numbers of published complaints are used by consumers or the media as an indicator for utility benchmarking, we may get a very false picture from which the public will draw incorrect conclusions.