Pre-application support

We engaged with stakeholders in order to review our pre-application support and advice proposition.

Our stakeholders continue to highlight the importance of pre-application support, as it enables them to explore their options and make more informed choices about how and where to connect.

The challenge for us is in being able to balance the demand for upfront engagement with our available resources and the levels of support our stakeholders increasingly expect.

To deliver this action, we engaged with a broad and inclusive range of connections stakeholders to understand their expectations of pre-application support and advice. We reviewed our current proposition and benchmarked it against other DNOs, as part of which we asked our stakeholders what others did well that we could learn from.

We included questions in a survey sent to 10,350 connections stakeholders. Of those who responded, more than half said they that had received some form of pre-application support within the past 12 months and were satisfied with their experience. Generation customers were the least satisfied group, suggesting we have more to do to meet the expectations of that particular group.
We invited 140 stakeholders who had booked a connections surgeries to tell us about their experience and any areas where we could improve. Those who responded were generally positive, stating that our engineers were helpful and knowledgeable but also highlighting issues with the availability and the wait times for surgeries. They also encouraged us to continue to develop our online resources that would enable them to self-serve and perform their own upfront assessments.

Whilst we do not consider the feedback that we received requires us to make any substantive changes to our current approach, there were certain aspects we want to consider further with input from those colleagues who deliver our upfront engagement. We will be sharing what our stakeholders have told us and how we intend to respond at stakeholder events and by publishing an updated pre-application support proposition on our website.