At Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), we’re proud of the strong track record we’ve built in delivering high quality digital services to our customers. As the pandemic hit in 2020, more people than ever before switched to digital channels to service their needs and customers told us how important it was for us to meet those needs and improve our portfolio of digital services.
The past couple of years has seen a rapid growth of customers choosing to use digital channels, with more than 80% of our customers now using one of our digital services to get in touch rather than traditional channels such as the telephone. It’s important that as customer expectations grow, we grow with them, and that’s why in 2021 we continued in our commitment to evolve our digital services.
SSEN is a consistently early adopter of new and upcoming digital services and has led the industry in many of these areas from the first Distribution Network Operator (DNO) to launch WhatsApp in 2018 (which is now our fastest growing contact channel), to the first to implement a Power Cut Chatbot - enabling customers to self-serve their outage enquiries. Our Power Track app has many new features added every year, with 2021 alone seeing a re-design of both our mobile and web app, the launch of automatic updates and the ability to find your nearest working Electric Vehicle Charging Point in an outage. Power Track itself has grown considerably with more than 600,000 customers accessing the app in the past year; more than double that of the year before.
Furthermore, as SSEN continues to evolve and expand its services, we hold a principle close to our hearts – in everything that what we do, we put our customers first. Every service and upgrade SSEN creates, is built around our customers’ needs, goals and expectations, and we continue to engage with our customers to understand how we’re doing. As an example, SSEN chooses to survey every single customer who engages with us relating to our services on social media, and last year our customers scored us an industry-leading average of 9.48 out of 10 for their online experience.
SSEN will continue to develop and improve its services in 2022 focusing on innovative solutions to build services centered around customers and communities.
Today, SSEN is excited to launch its new website – the window into our organisation and a vital part of our online platforms. Through ongoing engagement, our customers told us we could do more and over the past year we’ve been working with our digital partners, Mando, to build this new website; focusing on the creation of an accessible, user-centric and innovative experience for the 3.8 million homes and businesses SSEN serves. This new site includes a refreshed look and feel, together with plenty of new features: from the ability to locate information about works in your local area using our street works map, to an improved open data section of our site with new interactive heat maps for customers connecting to our network.
Furthermore, customers can now self-serve their needs better than ever before, from easy access to Power Cut information, the ability to raise complaints and compliments without the need to pick up the phone, and even register for SSEN events being hosting in your local community.
SSEN is committed to continuously improving this website so, in the months ahead, we will be dedicated to listening and responding to our customers and their experience of using the new website. And, as you tell us what you require – and how best you want to be kept updated, informed and assisted – SSEN will add more features to this ever- evolving platform.
This website has been developed with you in mind, so if you have feedback on the site, SSEN would love to hear it – just email ssenwebsite@sse.com.