What matters to Customers and Stakeholders
Each year, we analyse customer and stakeholder insights to prioritise key issues. This shapes our business objectives and engagement plans for the year ahead.
Global uncertainty has shifted customer priorities toward short-term thinking. Affordability of energy bills remains the top concern, especially for domestic customers. Younger customers value environmental sustainability, while vulnerable customers prioritise targeted support.
Despite affordability being dominant, customers also value safety and reliability.
The five priorities we consistently hear from our customers are:
1. Keeping bills as low as possible
2. Providing a safe service
3. Ensuring a reliable and resilient gas supply
4. Delivering value for money
5. Supporting those who need it most
Core Engagement Themes
Aligned with Ofgem’s key outcome areas, our four core engagement themes are:
Delivering Value
Improving efficiency and keeping costs low
Commitment to Improvement
We are committed to continuous improvement and innovation, leveraging collaboration, digitisation, and smarter ways of working to improve services without increasing costs for customers. Amid ongoing uncertainty and change, we also look to provide stability through strong leadership defined by reliability, openness, accountability, humility, compassion, and a steadfast commitment to being a responsible business—hallmarks of a high-performing anchor institution.
Looking Ahead
As we move into the RIIO-GD3 period, we will continue to embed best practice and ensure that stakeholder insight drives our priorities. To support this, we are making 15 voluntary engagement commitments, which we will report on annually through our Voluntary Stakeholder Report.
Meaningful
- Annually assess and map our stakeholders
- Undertake annual research to identify customer priorities
- Provide varied ways to discuss complex topics with customers and stakeholders
Honest
- Maintain our Independent Stakeholder Group to provide rigorous scrutiny
- Measure engagement against external assurance programmes
- Report annually on engagement commitments and stakeholder-led outcomes
Inclusive
- Use stakeholder feedback to identify trends and remove barriers
- Ensure engagement reaches diverse individuals and groups
- Track and improve inclusion of underreached customer groups in engagement
Iterative
- Analyse and act on insight to drive change
- Build on future customer engagement and host a youth energy summit
- Mature engagement processes and capability of colleagues
Proportionate
- Embed our new relationship management tool for unified stakeholder conversations
- Drive industry collaboration to tackle complex challenges
- Focus engagement on innovation, net zero, and impacted customer groups such as Industrial and non-domestic customers