Engaging customers to improve services

The customer care initiatives represent the consolidation of a path aimed at creating value for Snam and for the customer, increasing dialogue, engagement, discussion and interaction and ensuring increasingly effective management of the infrastructure to the benefit of the entire system. To this end, several stakeholder engagement initiatives (in particular workshops) were carried out in 2020 as well, despite the limitations imposed by the emergency situation caused by Covid-19, which made it necessary to revisit and reorganise them.

The central objective of the events was to listen to and discuss with customers the issues that are relevant to Snam and the market, as well as to discuss innovations and balancing operations, and to receive feedback on the updating of IT systems. Such involvement activities are essential in order to pursue the constant improvement of the quality of the services offered.

Three Sales Workshops were held, one on the Ten-Year Plans and one on the Settlement, most of which were delivered digitally thanks to Snam’s commitment to creating customer engagement events that maintained interactivity with customers and offered an experience as similar as possible to an in-person event. There were also activities focused on redesigning business process (e.g. for the ‘Jarvis’ platform), for which four co-design workshops were carried out. The meetings allowed Snam to understand customers’ expectations of making the platforms used daily for gas trading, sales and balancing activities as responsive as possible to their needs, highlighting the importance of constructive and collaborative dialogue.

Customer satisfaction thermal year 2019-2020

Knowing customers’ views on the activities and projects carried out during the year is crucial to ensure continuous service improvement. To this end, customer satisfaction surveys are constantly conducted to measure the degree of customer satisfaction with the new features introduced during the year, future initiatives and the quality of the service offered in general, such as the management of processes, the availability of people, the clarity, timeliness and completeness of the answers provided.

In order to measure customer satisfaction, at the end of each workshop, the completion of specific questionnaires was requested, and in December 2020, a new online survey was conducted, involving all shippers and traders with whom Snam worked in the 2019-2020 thermal year.

The analysis, aimed not only at transport activities but also at storage and regasification, concerned customer satisfaction in relation to the quality of services offered, the customer engagement activities undertaken and the functionalities and additional services introduced in 2020 also following the requirements revealed by the customers themselves as well as regulatory developments. The participation rate was 83.6% and the results were very positive with regard to the customer engagement activities developed by Snam to improve the services offered and consolidate proactive collaboration with all its stakeholders, with an average score of 8.6 in 2020 (on a scale of 0 to 10) and 8.2 measured as an average over the three years.

Annual average score

Engagement