Awards and Standards

RNIB Accessibility - See it Right

The Disability Discrimination Act (DAA) places a legal obligation on companies to meet the information needs of blind and partially sighted customers. Two years ago, the ELEXON website redesign gave us the opportunity to conform to the DDA. Since then, ELEXON’s in-house Web and Communications teams worked to ensure the site is as accessible as possible. This work has been undertaken with guidance from the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB), with the intention to achieve their 'See it Right' accreditation. In 2006, our site was audited, ELEXON has been accredited and we now display the See It Right logo throughout the site.

The See it Right logo is awarded to websites that the RNIB has audited and accredited according to the Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines (these are the definitive international guidelines for accessible websites). Our site will be listed on the RNIB website as the first utilities company in the country to receive accreditation.

Our website continues to be audited quarterly to ensure that accessibility and the accreditation is maintained.

For further information on accessibility standards, please visit the Accessibility and Technical Information page of our site.

Excellent Customer Service

As part of our commitment to delivering excellence service to our customers, we’ve joined the Institute of Customer Service to help us develop customer focus across the company. The Institute of Customer Service is the professional body for customer service. Its main purpose is to lead customer service performance and professionalism.

The ICS defines national professional and occupational customer service standards and facilitates customer service awards and qualifications. Some of our staff are working towards the ICS Professional Qualifications.

Committed to Excellence

In 2007, ELEXON was awarded Committed to Excellence status by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). ELEXON is using the EFQM Excellence Model to help us achieve our aim of business excellence in delivering our mission and attaining our vision. We are now part of a community of at least 30,000 organisations that are using the model to improve their business. Research shows that organisations with a business excellence approach obtain significant benefits – included amongst many, efficiency, effectiveness and reliability, customer satisfaction, improvement in financial performance, enhanced innovation, improved ideas generation and employee satisfaction and involvement.

What is the Business Excellence Model?

The Business Excellence Model is a framework that, when applied within an organisation, can help to focus thought and action in a more systematic and structured way. Thorough and consistent use of the model can lead to measurable ‘best in class’ performance levels.

The model can be used:

• to continually self-assess, as the driver of continuous improvement
• as a basis for designing and managing a business performance measurement system
• to benchmark against other like-minded organisations and
• as a base for the whole culture of the organisation

For further information please visit the British Quality Foundation website, or the European Foundation for Quality Management website.

XHTML Compliance

ELEXON's website conforms to the W3C XHTML 1.0 standard.

What are the Benefits?

In line with our ‘commitment to excellence’, our website conforms to industry best-practice development standards and techniques. We have full XHTML compliance which entitles us to display the official W3C logo. There are several benefits to developing our site this way.

Efficient Management

XHTML compliance brings uniformity to document structure, separating design from content and we have more control over how a page is displayed.

Increased Accessibility

XHTML websites are more accessible, and easier to use by those with a range of disabilities. Additionally, it also improves its readability to search engines.

Improved Performance

The better code standards enforced by XHTML result in a smaller file size. This reduces the loading time for our pages.

Increase Portability

Coding standards are defined to be as future proof as possible. This increases the potential to provide access to a wider range of users as more hardware devices are web enabled.

More information about the W3C XHTML 1.0 standard is available here.