Connections surgeries

We engaged with stakeholders to understand how we could improve their connections surgery experience.

Our monthly connections surgeries give customers and ICPs the opportunity to sit down with our design and commercial engineers and discuss any planned projects. Our customers continue to tell us how important these pre-application discussions are when exploring their options and how they benefit from our engineers’ local knowledge of the network.

We were the first DNO to introduce the surgery concept back in 2011 and, although our surgeries continue to be well utilised, we have been looking at how we can refresh the format and improve our customers’ experience.

Feedback is key to improving this service and so we identified 74 connections customers and ICPs who had attended a surgery in recent years and contacted them with an invitation to provide feedback on their experience. We followed this up with telephone interviews with regular surgery users to seek their views.

As a result of this feedback, we are taking steps to improve the way we promote our surgeries and implementing a new online process which will make it quicker and easier for customers to book and receive confirmation of their appointments. We will also be introducing a new process to survey their satisfaction with the service we provided.

Not all of the customers and ICPs who benefit from this service will have the time or ability to travel to our offices and so we made a commitment to trial ‘virtual’ surgeries. It took time to identify the right digital platform for us and our customers, resulting in us delivering this action later that forecast. However, we have successfully delivered six ‘virtual’ surgeries, all of which were very well received, and stakeholders can now choose whether they want to take part in a surgery at our offices, over the telephone or via WebEx.