How we’re doing with our complaints

We take every complaint seriously because we want to give you excellent service. So we’re working hard to understand where we are going wrong so we can fix the issues that are driving complaints.

Our latest report is for the second quarter of 2017 (1st April to 30th June 2017).

The complaints we’ve included for that time are from our residential customers, as well as the customers we have through our partnership brand Sainsbury’s Energy.^[1]

Meeting your Expectations - An update on our complaint improvement activities by Mark Hodges (PDF 247 KB)

Payments

Lots of things affect how many complaints we get about payments like seasonality, tariff changes, and how we explain payment plans. So we’re doing everything we can to make things simpler.

What we’ve done:

• We’ve made enhancements to our systems to minimise the impacts to our customers when we reassess their payment schemes.
• We’ve completed almost 500,000 reassessments of payment schemes this quarter to ensure that our customers’ payments will meet their anticipated consumption.
• It’s important that we explain changes to our customers in an easy to understand way, so we’ve made some changes to the letters we send to customers when their payment plan amounts are due to change.
• We’ve created some useful online videos for our Pay As You Go customers covering some of their most frequently asked questions.

What we’re doing:

• We’re improving the quality of information we use when setting up our customers’ payment schemes to limit the need for future instalment changes.
• We’re also reviewing how often we review payment plans to meet the needs of our customers.
• We’re reviewing the letters we send to our customers when their instalment amount does need to change in order to make them easier to understand.
• We’re listening to what our customers are telling us about aspects of our current payment methods that aren’t working for them and we’ll be looking to improve these as the year progresses.

Billing

We’re always looking at the reasons why our customers are unhappy about billing issues, so we can figure out how to fix them.

What we’ve done:

• Where SMART meters aren’t working we’ve started to contact customers and ask them to take a meter reading so we can ensure an accurate bill whilst we work on fixing the meter issues.
• We’ve improved controls and the management of information returned in the wrong format so that we can send more customers an accurate bill each month.
• We’ve made changes to the way we present information in our bills and statements, to make it clearer for our customers to see how much energy they have used and how much this is costing them.
• We’ve seen a significant decrease in the volume of billing complaints as we continue to focus on identifying and dealing with issues up front that could result in a delay or an issue with our customers receiving their bills on time.
• We’ve identified and fixed an issue impacting our ability to ask customers to provide meter readings – this will increase the number of bills we can send with accurate (as opposed to estimated) meter readings.
• We’ve improved our meter appointment visit timescales so we can now offer customers a visit earlier than we were previously able to do so.

What we’re doing:

• We’re reviewing the customer billing experience so we can look at ways of making further improvements.
• We’re looking at ways to improve our website and our app to make it easier for our customers to see what’s happening on their account.
• We’re reviewing the emails we send when bills are ready to view online to make sure our customers are aware of important information when we send it.

Metering

We always do our best to fix problems our customers have with their meters as we know that this can cause a lot of inconvenience.

What we’ve done:

• We’ve installed more than 360,000 Smart meters across Britain in quarter two.
• We have listened to feedback received about the energy efficiency advice provided and trialled new techniques for providing energy saving information & tips.
• More appointments have been made available to meet expected customer demand including at weekends.
• We’ve started to roll out our latest SMETS1 firmware to existing Smart customers so they can benefit from all features and be in more control of their energy usage. Customer reaction has been positive so far.

What we’re doing:

• As part of our Continuous Improvement initiative we are trialling different ways of working that will increase 1st visit install success.
• We continue to explore the possibility of offering appointments in the evening (to test customer demand) without compromising our existing offer.

Customer Service

Focusing on initiatives to ensure we get things right for our customers first time continues to be a priority for us.

What we’ve done:

• We know customers like to have the flexibility to interact with us without having to make a phone call.  We’ve therefore increased the number of people available to deal with our web chat enquiries.
• We’ve continued to ask our customers who’ve complained, for feedback on how we’ve handled things so we can identify where we need to make further improvements.
  
  

What we’re doing:

• We’re undertaking a significant programme looking at how we can further improve our handling of customer enquiries and complaints, in order to resolve concerns as quickly as possible.
• We’re making it easier for customers to interact with us by introducing improved SMS texting functionality across our business.
  

Communication

Communicating well with our customers is really important to us and we’re working hard to make sure we get things right.

What we’ve done:

• We’ve been testing new technology and innovative ways to get in touch with our customers in order to resolve their complaints. We’ve seen some positive results so we’ve extended these trials, and are continuing to monitor the results.

What we’re doing:

• We’re always looking at further ways we can improve the correspondence and bills we issue as we want to make sure they’re clear and easy to understand.
• We’re working to make further improvements to the experience our customers have when they visit our website.
• We’re reviewing how we receive and respond to emails from our customers so we can improve this process.