Utility firms fail on customer service

Management - News

Wednesday, 06 February 2008

Gas, electricity and telecoms companies are still failing on customer service, according to a report by the Citizens Advice Bureau.

Are you being served? CAB evidence on contacting utility companies shows how too many people are still being forced to spend long periods of time hanging on the telephone to their utility companies trying to get their problems resolved.

Nearly a third (32 per cent) of people completing a survey on the charity’s website had to spend more than 30 minutes on the phone to their utility company.

Many were unable to resolve their problem in just one call and even though many utility companies provide local or freephone numbers for their customers to contact them, those without a landline can rack up huge bills or run out of credit trying to get through on their mobile phones.

Worst performing call centres

Advisers in Citizens Advice Bureaux in England and Wales face the same problems when seeking to contact utility companies on behalf of clients.

The impact on the Citizens Advice service is so huge that the charity estimates that bureaux could help up to 55,000 extra people a year if calls from advisers to utility companies on behalf of clients lasted no more than ten minutes.

An Ipsos MORI survey carried out among a representative sample of adults in Great Britain for Citizens Advice revealed that even though there was some improvement since the last Citizens Advice report in 2004, utility call centres are still the worst performing call centres.

More than one in four (27 per cent) customers who had contacted a utility company by telephone in the last 12 months stated they were dissatisfied with the way in which their call had been handled.

This compared to 16 per cent for those who had contacted a financial services company call centre and 17 per cent for those who had contacted a retailer.

Too few incentives

Telephone and gas companies fared the worst. The online survey, found that nine out of ten (89 per cent) respondents were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the way their last call to a landline provider had been handled.

Eighty-seven per cent of these were calls to BT, considerably more than BT’s 68 per cent share of the domestic landline market.

For those contacting a gas supplier 81 per cent of respondents were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the way their last call had been handled. Seventy-one per cent of these were calls to British Gas which holds a 46 per cent market share.

Citizens Advice urged companies to improve customer service standards, but said that currently there are too few incentives for suppliers to improve their performance.

It called on regulators to require fuel and telecoms suppliers to provide up-to-date information about customer satisfaction, as well as costs. Its online survey found that almost all people would make use of this information when choosing a supplier.

Substantial improvements

Citizens Advice also said that the need for utility companies to improve customer service is set to get even more pressing as the Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Act 2007 will place an increased focus on companies’ internal processes for handling complaints.

The charity said that it is imperative that energy suppliers make substantial improvements in customer service now.

Citizens Advice chief executive David Harker said that utilities such as gas and telecoms are essential services that people need in order to survive in the modern world.

He called it vital that people are able to contact their providers effectively when they have queries or problems.

Yet he said the report showed that many companies have a long way to go before they respond to customer needs effectively.

"I would simply like to ask the chief executives of all the utility supply companies, and especially British Telecom and British Gas if they could investigate the issues in our report and make improvements,” Harker explained.

Case studies

A Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) in Hampshire saw a woman who decided to disconnect one of her phone lines after her husband passed away.

Over the course of three days, she spent three hours 30 minutes on the telephone trying to get through to the correct department. When she finally got through, both of her telephone lines were cut off.

It then took her eight days and over five hours of trying to get through on a friend’s telephone to be reconnected. Already distressed following the death of her husband and living alone in a rural location, the woman had no means of summoning help if she had needed it.

A CAB in Dorset reported a case where a builder and his wife were keen to retain their number for business reasons when they temporarily moved house. They paid their phone company £70 to put their old phone number in store so that they could use it when they moved back.

On returning to their original home, the client and her husband spent a total of 80 hours calling from their mobiles trying to get the number reinstated. The last call lasted 1 hour 20 minutes.

Significant costs

A CAB in West Sussex reported that a single woman, in receipt of income support, received an electricity bill for £190.52 two months after moving into a new flat.

The woman tried but failed to get through to the company to query the bill both from her mobile phone and when she ran out of credit, from a public phone box. Eventually, she wrote to her fuel supplier only to receive a letter back asking her to call Customer Services.

The client then received a letter from the fuel supplier which stated that she had 48 hours to pay the outstanding bill or she would be referred to a debt collection agency.

A CAB in South West Wales saw a 68 year old man on pension credit with literacy problems who paid for his gas by prepayment meter.

His supplier sent him a letter asking him to contact them to arrange recalibration of the meter following a price increase. As the man had no landline telephone, he had to call the supplier (an 0845 number) from his mobile phone.

He was repeatedly put on hold and incurred significant costs. The man was confused and upset that he had to make a potentially expensive phone call and that if he couldn’t get through his meter would not be adjusted, resulting in mounting debt.

The utility firms’ lack of proper customer service affects tens of millions of UK citizens.

There are 21.5 million domestic gas customers and 26 million domestic electricity customers in Great Britain; in addition, England and Wales have 23.4 million water customers and 22.3 million sewerage customers.

The CAB said that there are 33.6 million UK fixed line telephone customers and 69.7 million active mobile phone connections, whilst 15.2 million UK households have internet access.