Young Innovators Council (YIC) is the voice of young people at Northern Gas Networks. Its aim is to provide young people’s perspectives and help ensure young people’s thoughts and opinions are put at the heart of our decision making through meaningful and relevant engagement with our future customers.
2023 marks the third consecutive year of Northern Gas Networks’ Young Innovators Council
(YIC). The YIC continues to be the voice of young people at Northern Gas Networks (NGN). It
provides young people’s perspectives and Northern Gas Networks ensures these young
peoples’ thoughts and opinions are put at the heart of the business’ decision making. In this session, we wanted to understand what young people want from their customer journey, what young people expect a good customer experience to involve, and to discover how they might be more innovative and improve customer service and experience.
52.5%
of the YIC said that they would be willing to use a chatbot on a businesses website.
Customer Strategy
You said we need to demonstrate transparency, authenticity and an understanding of customers predicaments.
So we will ensure these principles are central at all points where we interact with customers.
Capabilities
You said customer teams should actively listen, provide clear guidance and accountability and the role shouldn’t be out sourced.
So we have reviewed our training to make sure all of these elements are covered, and keep our customer call centre based in our Sunderland office.
Capabilities
You said to have a clear overview of each individual customer’s circumstances when they call to speak to a business, pass them on as few times as possible.
So we will make sure this is covered as a basic principle in our customer service training.
Communication
You said that we need to provide clear options for customer contact and publicise them so that customers can choose, and utilise social media, especially Twitter, throughout the customer journey.
We are ensuring all contact options are on all our customer facing material and we are reviewing our social media activity.
Technology
You said live chat functions are a first port of call, and chatbots are the least preferred because they are unhelpful beyond very specific, instantaneous questions/answers.
We are trialing a chatbot to deal with basic inquiries and will explore whether we should / can introduce live chat as a result of our call centre team having more time.