It’s important to us that our channels for customer engagement and participation are accessible. My Place and Our Voice are fantastic tools for our customers to raise any queries with us and offer any insight but we know that there can be obstacles to using these for our customers who aren’t as confident using smartphones for instance.
This is certainly the case over in Richmond Park, a vibrant and diverse community in Sheffield, where we have a large neighbourhood of customers, not far from our Anchor Neighbourhood, Wybourn. We’ve boosted our engagement with this particular community in the past year, with the community centre re-opening this summer having been refurbished, and celebrated with a Family Fun Day. With there being an array of community offers at the centre, such as the children’s ‘Kicks’ sessions delivered by Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Community Partnership, digital support sessions for mostly older residents has long been in the pipeline as something that would be extremely beneficial.
Of course, digital skills is a broad term, but with mobile phones becoming more and more essential for day-to-day life, ensuring our customers have the skills to navigate these devices and stay safe using them seemed like a good place to start for our Community Partnership Manager, Steven Gayle. Steve recently approached EE to see if they could provide some specialist in-person support sessions to some of our older customers who have up till now been hindered by feeling apprehensive about going online – and understandably so given the rise in scammers, hackers and phishers. EE responded positively, offering to deliver a session on online safety and how to navigate mobile devices, which one of their staff, Neil, delivered earlier this month to some of our older customers at the community centre in Richmond Park.
During the two-hour session, EE staff answered any questions our customers had about using apps, managing contacts, accessing emails and staying safe online. As Steven Gayle told us, it went down very well:
“The session was well received and our customers later told me that the information provided was extremely useful and made them feel more knowledgeable about staying safe online. Customers were particularly grateful for the 1-1 support EE staff were able to offer.”
EE are now looking to expand these sessions to our other regions, and what’s more, their sessions at Richmond Park are to be followed up with a wider programme of various digital skills, delivered through our partnership with Sheffield Lifelong Learning, Skills and Employment. Part of this training will include an overview of our website and support with registering to access our digital platforms such as Our Voice, My Place and our new Self-Serve Repairs portal, which recently went live in the East Region. This is great news for our customers who could benefit from these sessions, and also helps us to better support our customers as more make use of our platforms.
