Talking Energy Priority customers

• Our Responsibilities
• The Issues
• 2010 Performance
• Act Responsibly
• Public safety
• Employee involvement
• Priority customers
• Community Excellence
• Education
• Responsible procurement
• Compliance
• Supporting Vulnerable Communities
• Funding for Community Groups
• Responsible Selling
• Customers
• Reliable energy
• Low carbon society
• Environment
• Our people
• Data and Assurance
• GRI Index
• 2009 Performance
• 2008 Performance
• What We're Doing
• How we do business

Act Responsibly

Priority Service Customer Care

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Although we sold our Central Networks business in 2011, in 2010 we recognised that power cuts are distressing for everyone, but especially if you rely on electricity for medical reasons.

We wanted to make sure all vulnerable customers in our region were included on our Priority Service Register (PSR) and we sought to keep their details regularly updated, enabling us to provide the extra care and tailored communications. The key is to ensure we effectively shared data with suppliers and during 2010, we sent almost 40,000 updated records to suppliers.

RNID's ‘Louder Than Words’ charter mark

We were awarded the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID)’s ‘Louder Than Words’ deaf awareness charter mark for the fourth year running. We continued to expand the provisions in place for deaf and hard of hearing customers.

Our Customer Support Vehicles

For eight years our Customer Support Vehicles (CSVs) offered valuable direct support to customers during prolonged power cuts, including up-to-date information, a warm drink, a crisis pack, and a friendly, reassuring face. In 2010, the CSVs were used 42 times, providing vital support at incidents affecting some 2,127 customers.

Vulnerable persons events

2010 saw a huge increase in the amount of external events we attended. These varied but were essentially Doorstep Crime Awareness Events, Wise and Well, and Preparing for Winter. We attended well over 120 such events during the year, doubling the total attended in 2009. Volunteers hand out our crisis packs, information leaflets and offer advice as well as delivering presentations.

Crisis packs

We asked customers what they thought of our crisis packs and what we could do to improve them. General consensus was that we should include an ’old fashioned’ telephone (rather than a cordless phone) in line with our advice about keeping such a phone in the house. From 2010 the packs have contained analogue telephones with over 12,000 distributed during 2010.

Partnering with the British Red Cross (BRC)

We established a tailored approach that involves BRC using its expertise to provide vital additional support to all customers during prolonged power cuts, especially to individual vulnerable customers. We also provided 2,000 dual branded crisis packs to the BRC to give out.

Harder to reach customers - Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB)

We recognised that the Citizens Advice Bureaux continued to be popular sources of information for many people on a range of issues, so we sent a pack containing our customer information leaflets to each CAB office in our region. These leaflets told customers all they needed to know about Central Networks, from contact details to information about when our engineers may have needed to access a customer’s property as well as general advice about what to do if the lights go out. Following a significant increase in the number of foreign farmers working in our region, we continued to produce our ‘Farming Safely’ advice about agricultural activities near overhead power lines in languages including Russian, Romanian, Polish, Turkish, and Latvian.

Critical customer information

We continued to update our priority service register through our agreement with Air Products that provides us with monthly updates on people registered as oxygen users. We continued to contact customers regularly to keep the register up to date.

Reacting to one of the coldest winters on record

In late 2010, we worked with Age UK to concentrate efforts on ensuring our vulnerable customers were alert to the dangers of a cold winter by bringing a new Cold Alarm to the UK market. This is a device that warns when the temperature of a room falls dangerously low, offering a vital early warning signal to the risk of hypothermia. We distributed these handy gadgets free of charge to around 60,000 of our most at-risk customers, allowing them to protect themselves against cold weather.