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We talk a lot about customers and we talk about putting them at the heart of everything
we're doing. And I genuinely believe that. But actually it becomes real when we meet
them. We need to almost detach ourselves slightly from, you know, the fact that we work for
an energy company and its about energy and we're kind of interested about this. To saying
how is the consumer feeling today.
So today we're in a hotel in Cheltenham where we have brought a number of our senior Execs
together with a number of our customers. To really help the exec understand what's really
important to customers, what do they think of energy, what do they actually think of
npower.
So we had the idea of finding some families that we wanted to work with for six months.
And almost that would highlight the wider listening programme we're working on but by
focusing on these particular families and really bringing that to life.
We brought the customers together just for an initial meet and greet, where all of the
execs said 'hello' to the customers who were stood in front of big pictures of their houses.
Following that, we then did a big icebreaker session where we asked both the exec and the
customers to come into a room and create a big collage and actually just create a visual
representation of what should npower actually be doing for you.
Ta dah, here's our masterpiece.
So the final exercise that we did was more like, if you think about a speed dating type
of exercise, where each of the exec spent about five or six minutes with a number of
the families, where they could follow up on a number of the conversations they'd already
had.
It sounds like you're well into under standing all this and, I think, Betty you were saying
that Ian does it all, sorts it all out.
We got a knock on the door about 8 years ago from a chap who said 'I can save you some
money on your electricity bill and he did so we...
And that was an npower person?
Yeah
Okay
You know, a high priority of mine, that, that people ring you back when they say they're
going to ring you back.
A prepayment card would be fine if you could do it on line if you didn't actually have
to go to the shops I had to drive to the shop and so I rang npower up and they said 'yeah,
we can do that'.
I think that npower's quite good. You know, when you phone up to get things done they
do, you know, take on board what you say. They do, you know, try to sort the situation
out, you know, to the best of their ability.
In terms of the bills side of things, I would expect the company to look and see and say
actually, she's been spending... she's been using an awful lot over the last few months,
we'd better get in contact with her because we don't want to lumber her with a huge bill.
I think the day has been great, there's been a huge amount of energy, huge amount of enthusiasm
and we've already had comments from the customers saying how useful this has actually been,
how it is actually really showing that npower are really interested in their customers and
really want to understand them, as well as from the execs saying that 'actually this
brings me back down to earth, I've got the same issues as some of these customers as
well. And at the end of the day, these are people.'
Well, I was convinced that I would freeze because it's sort of human nature. But everybody's
been great, and so it's been a great day; I've really enjoyed it.
Today's been amazing, it's been a bout spending time with customers, about listening to them
and how energy can play an important part in their lives. You know, sometimes when you're
on the board or at very senior levels, you don't get time to have that face to face and
so this has been really valuable to us, to actually have face to face time listening
to our customers, and their hopes and their fears and their concerns. And you know, huge,
huge energy and huge engagement.