5 Ways Bad Customer Service from Energy & Water Suppliers Could be Costing Your Business

So, you’ve negotiated that great new deal with your energy supplier for next year’s energy, you’ve checked their terms and conditions and are eagerly awaiting the savings on your first invoice.

But if you’re not careful, that great deal could end up costing your business more than you’d hoped – both in time and money, if your chosen supplier fails to give you the good customer service you expected.

There has been a lot of coverage in the news recently about poor customer service in the domestic energy market; Ofgem have recently issued fines to suppliers ranging from £1m to £26m due to customer service failings and mishandling customer complaints. Unfortunately situations like this are not uncommon in the energy industry and are not isolated to the household suppliers – recent fines and sanctions have been handed out to business suppliers as well.

There are a number of ways suppliers can make it challenging to effectively manage your energy contracts and this can range from late or inaccurate billing to unhelpful customer services teams and broken promises on those juicy extras negotiated at renewal so we thought we would share some common issues to lookout for.

1. Billing Errors

Incorrect invoices can quickly build up very big time overheads, if you are having to hunt down bills sent to incorrect addresses or to correct wrong payment terms. The financial implications of sloppy billing can also be significant; businesses being overcharged might never detect the problem without professional support. Looking the other way and undetected undercharges could be a ticking time bomb with significant costs.

2. Billing Corrections

You have spotted the error and the supplier has agreed to correct it. But how your supplier generates bills can be another sticking point with some suppliers only able to ‘reconcile’ bills instead of cancelling the originals out right. This is particularly true for SME energy and water suppliers and can quickly lead to a large number of increasingly complex bills for just a single month all needing to be processed.

3. Payments

Payment terms can have a big impact on the cost of your energy for a year-long contract. Whilst some supplier’s levy additional charges for non-direct debit payment (even if you contracted for non-DD terms).Others have punitive late payment charges with excessive fixed charges and interest rates. This is quickly frustrating if the source of the delay was the supplier’s error. Even if you pay by Direct Debit you are not immune to payment woes with some suppliers failing to suspend payments for large overcharges whilst “resolving” issues, then take the payment anyway. Combine this with a supplier reconciled billing and your accounts can quickly become an unmanageable mess.

4. Meter readings

Do you remember to take meter readings on a regular basis and pass these to your supplier in time for the invoice to come through, or are you finding that your invoices are mostly based on estimated consumption? Some supplier’s even charge you for revising invoices based on estimated meter reads, if they are not sent over within a set timeframe. Others refuse to correct until the next bill leaving you to pay high over estimated invoices.

5. Contact Centres

Poor customer service can come under a variety of banners, and one of the key pitfalls businesses meet when dealing with their energy supplier is the contact centre. Suppliers with long wait times and outsourced call centres can cause a real headache when raising even a simple query. We deal with one supplier who, since moving their call centre abroad, has more than doubled their service level agreement for resolving issues and another who’s SLA for sorting out complaints was over 5 months!

This often leads to a disproportionate amount of time required for your staff trying to resolve relatively simple issues, complicated both by poor service on behalf of the supplier and a potential lack of understanding of the energy industry.

What to do

There is not a single supplier in the market that wants to provide bad customer service (this is not the same as wanting to provide great service mind you). It is time consuming for their staff and bad PR for their sales teams.

If you are receiving poor customer service therefore let the supplier know and raise a complaint. If you are doing this then start keeping detailed notes. Time, date and names, what was agreed and deadline. Spend a few minutes reading the suppliers compliant procedures and escalate the complaint at the earliest opportunity. Remember just because it is their system or procedure doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it!

If you qualify to be able to refer your complaint to the ombudsman do so. Let the supplier know you are about to – you may well get a last minute change of heart.

Prevention is better than cure

If you are organising your own contracts; do some research on customer service levels but beware mistaking SME & C&I departments; these are often quite separate and service levels can be drastically different.

If you are using a broker/consultant (Third Party Intermediary TPI) for your contracts find out what percentage of their clients they do hands on account management for. TPIs potentially have great visibility of current supplier trends as they tend to work with a large number suppliers at any given time.

If you are struggling with bad customer service consider employing a TPI to manage your energy accounts, one of the key benefits could come from invoice validation – especially when they are working on a fixed fee basis (as opposed to shared savings). That way, your staff aren’t spending hours on the phone trying to sort problems because your TPI is doing that job for them and because it is fixed fee it is in the TPIs interest for things to run as smooth as possible too.