Powerco in collaboration with Frank Engagement
The challenge
Powerco is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest electricity and gas distribution businesses, delivering energy to more than one million people across the North Island.
As the energy sector evolves, so do expectations: communities increasingly want to be heard, the Commerce Commission expects meaningful customer input into investment priorities, and customers expect transparent communication and genuine consultation.
Powerco had made a commitment to deliver authentic and meaningful engagement across its business, to inform actions and improve decision-making. As part of this, Powerco’s Engagement Structures Strategy, developed by Frank Engagement recommended regional customer forums as a key tool for regularly checking in with customers on issues contributing to the energy trilemma.
Having developed five Customer Commitments and 22 customer outcomes, Powerco needed to test them with real customers. The challenge was to design and deliver inaugural forums that would generate genuine, actionable insights from a diverse cross-section of customers – and do so in a way that could be repeated and scaled across the five regions Powerco operates in.
Our approach
Frank Engagement worked closely with Powerco’s Communications and Engagement team to bring the recommended forum model to life for the first time.
Design
Together, we designed a forum model that was accessible, deliberative, and repeatable. Five distinct customer groups were identified – tangata whenua, rural, urban-residential, business, and higher-needs communities – to ensure Powerco captured the full range of perspectives relevant to its customer base.
A series of four sessions was designed for each region: one five-hour in-person session to set the scene and prioritise Customer Commitments, followed by three weekly 90-minute online sessions for deeper discussion on prioritised outcomes. We designed workshop materials, including a guiding presentation, A1 prioritisation posters, and a Zoom Whiteboard environment for online sessions, supported by Powerco’s own Customer Commitment materials.
We worked alongside recruiter, People4Info, who Powerco engaged to find and manage 25 participants per region from a panel of more than 60,000 New Zealanders, targeting a diverse cross-section of customers.
Delivery
In May 2026, customer forums were held in Tauranga and Manawatū, bringing together 50 people across both regions. Frank Engagement director and principal consultant, Erin Harford-Wright, facilitated all sessions, supported by a core group of five Powerco customer-facing team members in each region.
In-person sessions used hands-on exercises to build understanding and warm participants up for the more detailed online discussions, including:
- A customer commitment prioritisation activity;
- A pub-style quiz to test participant understood Powerco’s role; and
- A case study applying customer commitments to a Powerco project.
Online sessions used digital whiteboards to gather structured feedback group-by-group across three weekly sessions.
Frank Engagement collated, analysed and reported insights in an engagement report, which identified themes and actions. This provided Powerco with strong recommendations they could take to improve their customer service and community relationships.
The Outcome
The inaugural customer forums produced rich, actionable insights from 50 customers across two regions and five customer groups – the first time Powerco had tested its Customer Commitments directly with the public.
Five themes emerged consistently across both regions and all groups: a need to raise awareness of Powerco’s role in the electricity industry; a strong call for proactive, multi-channel communication around outages and planned works; reliability and resilience as the core network expectation; a desire for genuine community presence before projects begin; and care for vulnerable customers as a shared community value.
Customer priorities shifted through the process. At the start, reliability and affordability dominated. By the final session, priorities were more evenly spread, and the value people placed on having a say in Powerco’s planning had nearly doubled. The more customers understood about Powerco, the more they wanted to participate in its decisions.
The forums produced ten priority actions for Powerco and a practical set of process learnings that will improve future forums. The model itself proved its value – Powerco now has a tested, repeatable framework for regional customer engagement that can be scaled across its network.
