Can you help us innovate?

Our big question:

How can we make our digital platforms more engaging, keeping our customers visiting to do more than just transactional activities?

The sessions will be delivered online from 3^rd – 6^th July 2023 and will follow a specific and structured five stage process.

Visit the Innovation Festival site to register. 

Northumbrian Water’s aim is to put our digital platforms at the heart of delivering a brilliant customer experience.

Digital services often start out to remove the need for a customer to call the contact centre, but we (Shout AND Northumbrian Water) believe they should also enable engagement on a wide range of topics, outside of account management and issue reporting.

What could that look like in practice?

That’s what our design sprint is designed to discover…

The sprint will bring together ideas from all the participants, and shape them in under a week to a working concept to be presented back to the festival.

The best ideas come when there are a range of voices in the room – so that means YOU are definitely qualified.

Skills in finance, marketing, design, technology, logistics, customer experience, customer service are all welcome.

You might be a student, a new graduate, a manager, leading a department, a CEO… or ‘just’ a customer.

 Sprints are expertly facilitated by a sprint lead, who guide the sprint team through each stage of the process, so all you need to bring is your attention and curiosity!

About Innovation Festival

The Innovation Festivals are a key part of the innovation work at Northumbrian Water Group. The organisation sees innovation as crucial to its success in solving some the biggest challenges facing the water industry and beyond.

Each year the Festival surfaces and refines dozens of ideas, remotely through July, and in person during the Festival week. Many of these ideas go on to become real life projects both internally at Northumbrian Water and more widely.

Readers in the Northumbrian Water operating areas might recognise the ‘Bin the Wipe’ campaign – that started life at the festival back in 2019.

And one of the most successful projects has been getting a national register of underground assets moving – requiring collaboration across the utilities sector and with central government.   

The festival sets a theme each year, and this year it’s Citizens. From the festival website:

“The Citizens theme this year reflects the superpower that is our community, coming together and achieving the impossible. Against all odds. Together, we can solve anything.”

We hope you can join us on our virtual sprint!

Register for the sprint.

Find out more about the Innovation Festival https://www.innovationfestival.org/