Utility stakeholder relationship management (SRM) is the practice of recording and coordinating every interaction a water, gas or electricity company has with the people and organisations affected by its work, in one shared system. It brings customers, communities, regulators, landowners and politicians into a single record, so a utility can show who it engaged, when, how and with what outcome.
A utility doesn’t engage stakeholders to close a sale. It engages them because a regulator, a planning inspector or a community expects to see a defensible account of the conversation. SRM is the discipline and the software that produces that account.
What counts as a stakeholder for a utility?
For a water, gas or electricity company, a stakeholder is anyone with an interest in, or affected by, how the network is run and built. That’s a far wider group than a customer list. It spans domestic and business customers, parish and community groups, landowners, environmental bodies, emergency responders, MPs and councillors, and the sector regulator.
SSEN puts the scale plainly: its two licensed network areas carry electricity to over 3.7 million homes and businesses, and the list of interested parties runs from trade bodies and environmental groups to regulators and government. National Grid, running electricity and gas networks on both sides of the Atlantic, engages customers, regulators, communities and government across the whole footprint. The same person often appears in several of those groups at once, which is exactly why a shared record matters.
How is SRM different from a CRM?
A customer relationship management (CRM) system tracks revenue, pipeline and sales conversations. Stakeholder relationship management tracks relationships, sentiment, issues and engagement activities. The jobs are different, so the data models are different.
A utility’s stakeholder isn’t a lead to be converted. They’re a landowner whose field sits on a cable route, a councillor briefing residents on a reservoir, or a regulator reviewing a price submission. A CRM models a linear funnel from lead to customer. Stakeholder work is many-to-many: one community group touches five projects, three teams engage one MP. Tractivity, the UK SRM platform, is built around that shape, capturing who matters, what they think, and how their position is moving, rather than whether they’ll buy.
This is why utilities that try to repurpose a sales CRM or a spreadsheet tend to hit a wall.
What does utility stakeholder relationship management involve?
Good utility SRM brings four things into one place.
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A single stakeholder record - every email, meeting, call, survey response, event and comment is logged against the stakeholder it relates to, across every programme
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A shared view - project teams see the same stakeholder and coordinate rather than sending four uncoordinated approaches from one company
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A communications suite - mailshots, surveys, consultations, and events sit within the same system that holds the record, with opt-ins and unsubscribes tracked for UK GDPR compliance
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Regulator-ready reporting - the evidence of who was engaged, when and how, can be produced on demand
Held together, they turn scattered activity into an auditable programme. The record survives staff turnover too, which matters when a reservoir or a transmission project runs for a decade, and the original team has long since moved on.
Why does the ‘relationship’ part matter for utilities?
Because utilities are judged on the relationship, not the transaction. Ofwat’s price reviews expect water companies to show how customer and stakeholder views shaped their plans. Ofgem’s RIIO framework sets the same expectation for energy networks. For major schemes classed as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, the Planning Inspectorate examines the consultation record itself, and the Gunning Principles remain the legal test: consult when views can still influence the outcome, give people enough to respond, consider what they say, and keep it in mind when deciding.
None of that can be evidenced from memory. It needs a dated, searchable record of the relationship over time. EDF Energy’s Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C programmes show what that looks like at scale: around 30,000 issues logged and tagged, 130,000+ engagements, and a 100% response rate on stakeholder issues, all exportable when an examination phase closes.
What does good utility SRM look like in practice?
It looks like one system is carrying both the daily work and the major projects. Anglian Water manages more than 13,000 stakeholders in Tractivity across a roughly £10 billion investment programme, keeping political data current through a Mapolitical integration and handing evidence to the regulator during both routine briefings and live incidents.
Tractivity runs our live interactive, day-to-day stakeholder programme, which is invaluable to us. It saves time and provides fantastic insight and reporting outputs that we can present to our Executive Committee on performance and engagement. - Grant Tuffs, Regional Engagement Manager, Anglian Water
It also looks like adoption that sticks. National Grid runs 430+ users across the UK and US east coast; SSEN grew from 15 users in 2018 to over 200 today. On average, teams using the platform report a 20% efficiency gain per engagement professional, worth £5,000 to £8,200 a year, most of it recovered from reporting and record-keeping admin.
See Tractivity in action
If you’re managing stakeholder engagement across a utility network and want to see how a purpose-built SRM platform holds the record together, our team would be glad to show you. Whether it’s a single reservoir consultation or a decade-long transmission programme, the sooner every interaction sits in one place, the easier the evidence is to produce.
Book a demo to see it with your own programmes in view, or get in touch if you’d like to talk your setup through first.
Frequently asked questions
