On 1 July we submitted our first draft business plan to Ofgem’s Customer Challenge Group for their review. This marked a major milestone as we continue to shape our plans for the next five years (from 2021 to 2026).
Our plan is focused around four customer and stakeholder outcomes:
- Delivering a resilient network
- Providing a quality experience to all of our customers, stakeholders and communities
- Improving the environment and tackling climate change
- Trusted to act for society
These outcomes have been identified through an extensive process of research and engagement with more than 20,000 of our customers and stakeholders during a 12-month period.
We’ve added to this over 1 million insights that we’ve received from customers over the past three years and have undertaken a large-scale benchmarking exercise to understand how others are delivering outstanding value and experiences to their customers and stakeholders. Never before have we shaped our future plans so much around the input that we’ve received through our engagement activities.
This is essential for us if we are going to achieve the ambition level set out by our company vision; ‘to set the standards that all of our customers love and others aspire to’. How can we do this unless we know what standards our customers want, need and expect?
That is one of the reasons that the we are so keen to find ways to speak with our customers - so that we can understand the standards that we must set – importantly recognising that no two customers are the same and some standards will be specific to an individual’s needs.
Our plan shows an incredible amount of ambition and I am confident that commitments that we are making directly relate to the feedback and insights that have been shared with us through our engagements to date. But, we need to test this and that’s what we’re doing over the next few months. We are seeking further input in many ways, including facilitated workshops, online surveys and our Cadent Voices campaign, where we are visiting
five major cities to share our plans and seek your views.
We could not have developed such a targeted draft business plan without the fantastic level of input from our customers and stakeholders to date. We want to commit to a plan that will deliver the standards that our customers and stakeholders love and one that gives back to the communities in which we operate. Please help us to do this by sharing your insights and
completing our survey.
Mark Belmega, Director of Customer Strategy