Customer Driven - becoming more customer centric at National Highways

This week is National Customer Service Week. It is a week when National Highways joins in with many other organisations around the country to recognise the importance of customer service and celebrate the people who serve and support our customers. And so I thought there’s no better time to reflect both on our customer journey to date and our ambitions going forward…

Our customer journey

In 2015, National Highways established ‘Customer’ as one of our three company imperatives. This marked a big shift – recognising the 4 million plus people that travel on our roads every day as customers of our services as opposed to ‘road users’ who happen to be passing through a piece of infrastructure we provide.

Transforming any organisation to ‘think Customer’ is no small task, but since the start of the first road period in 2015 we have made significant progress. We appointed Customer Service Directors and developed our first Customer Service Strategy. We enhanced our insight capability and established annual customer service plans to help drive delivery focused on what our customers want and need. All of this improved our customer maturity and culture.

However, as we start to look to the future and the opportunities and challenges it brings, we want to do more for our customers. The long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is still unknown, but we do know that the Strategic Road Network will remain at the core of our transport system and fundamental to connecting communities and supporting the economy. Levels of traffic are broadly back to pre-pandemic levels and are forecast to grow (especially in freight and logistics). Technology and information advances will bring about new opportunities to potentially transform our customers’ experience, while also improving safety and delivery. Environmental issues also need to be right at the heart of our customer thinking, as we look to decarbonise roads through the likes of Electric Vehicles, as well as mitigate some of the negative impacts we know our roads can have on communities they pass through (some of our customers are not actually road users….).

Building momentum

Over the past seven years, we have constantly strived to make our customers’ journeys better. We’ve created new customer insight tools which also include the ability for real time customer feedback, and we have set up customer and professional driver panels to allow us to hear directly from our customers about their needs. Through listening to our customers, we now operate over 91% of our roadworks to the highest safe speed (often 60mph), which our customers said made them feel safer, resulted in improved speed compliance, as well as delivering over ￡60 million of economic savings.

In most cases, often the faces that our customers see on our schemes and through our roadworks are those of our supply chain. We have worked to build stronger relationships across all our supply chain through clearer, easier procurement processes and guidelines on best customer practice. This includes a customer view of roadworks toolkit. The toolkit helps to align our partnership and to drive consistency with working practices across our suppliers.

To keep our customers moving, we’ve made improvements to the electronic message signs we set, creating over a 100 new customer focused messages, and improving the accuracy and timeliness of our variable speed limits. We have worked with stakeholders to drive greater experiences for our customers, from working with emergency services to improve incident clearance on the network, to providing diversion route standards and working with local authorities to support communities surrounding our network.

We have set ourselves targets on our company environmental impacts, shifting a lot of our fleet to zero emissions vehicles, and on our construction areas we are working hard to lower emissions and recently delivered the UKs first carbon neutral minor works scheme project on the A590 road resurfacing scheme in Cumbria. We are also supporting our customers shift to electric vehicles and we are integral in the infrastructure changes to support this.

Becoming more customer-centric?

We published our new Customer Service Strategy in May 2021, focusing on improving customer experience over the second road period (2020-25). The strategy centres around building our capability to be more customer-centric; to better deliver the basics so that we can ultimately deliver stress free journeys.

Our recently formed Customer, Strategy and Communications directorate reflects our ambition to put our customers and stakeholders even more firmly at the centre of our thinking. It will enable us to make sure that our customers are at the heart of all our strategies, and to communicate this to our customers more clearly.

We are also using this organisation change to challenge ourselves as to how we can become even more customer centric. While we have done a lot over recent years, we know there is much more we can do. We also have some quite specific challenges - for example, being an organisation that doesn’t have a direct commercial relationship with individual customers can make it more challenging to get everyone to think ‘customer first’ all the time. How do you drive ever greater customer centricity in this context? It’s a challenge we’re currently exploring.

So what’s next?

As we plan for the third road period (2025-30), our key purpose of connecting the country, underpinned by our three imperatives of customer, safety and delivery remains the same.

However, our ambition is to go even further and think more broadly about how we serve our customers, particularly as their needs could change significantly over this period. We have the chance to do things differently, things that we would never have been able to do before.

For example, as vehicles electrify, how do we work with government and industry to make sure the infrastructure needed for charging is in place? And operating a network with an increasingly electric fleet will also bring different challenges – for example, electric vehicles cannot be towed in the same way as tradition ICE vehicles and so we have now equipped all our Traffic Officers with plastic skates (called ‘Slippery Jims’) and battery boosters to move broken down electric vehicles to safety quicker.

Another example is the increasingly critical role digital technology will play in transforming the customer experience over this period. Our digital roads vision articulates how we will use technology to transform how our roads are designed, built, operated and used. We are already seeing significant changes, from doing construction quicker with less impact by using 3D rehearsals in a digital environment, to a pilot we recently did in Manchester.?The pilot used floating mobile phone data to help us set the signs and signals on the surrounding network to alleviate pressure on local commuting routes. This demonstrates how we can use technology to operate beyond our traditional boundaries. But some are predicting even greater shifts over the second half of this decade, particularly through the advent of connected and autonomous vehicles. So we’ve been really reflecting; how can this deliver better value for our customers? What’s our role in supporting the take up and use of this technology? What unique value add can we provide? And what information will our customers need and how should we get that across to them?

Our customer journey aims to make us fit for the future while also making sure that we are driving up performance improvements on a day-to-day basis. With our network carrying two thirds of all freight movements and a third of all vehicles journeys we truly do connect the country. We understand the part we must play in reducing our environmental impact and we take seriously, our responsibility to leave a positive legacy for the communities around our network. We are committed to continually making a difference for our customers, and I am excited about the future that National Highways can help shape and provide for them.

#NCSW22