Our frontline teams’ commitment to going above and beyond has been recognised at the 2023 Gas Industry Awards, where we won the Customer Service Award.
The Gas Industry Awards is organised by the Institution of Gas Engineers & Managers (IGEM) and the Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA), celebrating the very best people, projects and companies in the UK gas industry.
It follows our success in May this year at the prestigious CCA Global Excellence Awards where our Customer Service team won four awards, including gold for Team of the Year.
Our engineers visit some of the most vulnerable members of our communities and despite making emergency situations safe, there have been many occasions where they were uncomfortable walking away from customers in need.
In response, we built a network of support services for engineers to refer vulnerable customers for help. Our Careline service includes 14 services, such as funding boiler repairs for customers in financial hardship, plus access to partners for energy efficiency and wellbeing support.
Making it as easy as possible to offer help, we developed a bespoke customer toolkit with embedded referral app. The toolkit contains video guides to all our services and training from partners on topics including mental health and disability. With the toolkit live, our engineers referred 221% more vulnerable households for support in 2022 than 2021.
Our Careline service has also been extended into communities this year, with the introduction of our mobile Safe and Warm Community Hubs for customers to access energy safeguarding and financial wellbeing support alongside our operational projects.
We’ve already pledged to help 250,000 vulnerable customers between 2021 and 2026, thanks to the Vulnerability and Carbon Monoxide Allowance (VCMA) which has been made available by our regulator Ofgem.
Together, our engineers and Customer Service team supported 17,220 vulnerable households to access 21,628 services in 2022, achieving over £1.2m in social value.
“Keeping our most vulnerable customers safe and warm across our regions is an undoubted priority in the current climate and we’re particularly proud that the outstanding work by our teams has been acknowledged at a time like this.”
