What have we learned?
Alliander always strives to perform its duties and activities to the best of its ability. However, unexpected incidents, developments and events can never be ruled out. We want to learn from these experiences in order to further enhance the quality of our organisation. Some noteworthy events from 2015 are outlined below.
Everyone safely home
What happened?
Everyone safely home. That is our central objective for the safety theme. Nevertheless, various colleagues reported sick due to accidents and incidents in the year under review. In 2015, 24 accidents led to sickness absenteeism. This concerned accidents with our own employees, as well as with employees of contractors working on our behalf.
What have we learned?
Safety has top priority within Alliander. In order to improve our safety performance, Alliander adopted a new safety approach in 2014 for employees, subcontractors and other business partners. This approach forms the guideline for the measurement and continuous improvement of our daily safety performance. The new approach consists of improvement projects, safety campaigns and a stronger managerial focus on safety.
About 240 escalated customer complaints
What happened?
We continuously aim to improve our services. Nevertheless, Liander received complaints last year, of which about 240 were escalated (2014: 300). These were dealt with by Liander's 'Customer Ombudsman', who makes an independent assessment of problems (within Liander) and engages in a dialogue with customers about their experiences. Most complaints in 2015 concerned energy meter readings, interruptions and activities during the installation of energy meters.
What have we learned?
We further improved our communications and devoted attention to specific network operation issues in order to explain these in a clear and transparent manner to the customer. But we also devoted attention to behaviour: how do we put the customer first and how do we perform our work? The complaint and the customer is now our top priority in our year plans.
Working together on underground infrastructure
What happened?
In the past one and a half years various gas and water mains breakages led to gas interruptions lasting several days. Though everything was done to resolve the interruptions quickly, these incidents caused great inconvenience to our customers.
What have we learned?
These incidents prompted the network operators Vitens and Liander to intensify their cooperation. Together with all water companies, we identified and analysed the vulnerable points and high-risk areas, in order to target our maintenance and replacement efforts more effectively. In September, Vitens and Liander started replacing some 46 kilometres of water and gas mains in Apeldoorn.