Our complaints performance
We’re on a mission to make energy better, and we take pride in offering great customer service. 75% of customers who contacted us in 2023 were “satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” with our service. We’re now rated “Excellent” on Trustpilot, with over 80% of our reviews getting 4 or 5 stars.
We also know there’s always room to do more. That’s why we regularly review the feedback we get from customers about how we’re doing – and where we can improve. Below are some of the areas we’ve been told we could improve in, and what we’re doing about it.
Every quarter, we review and publish data on all the complaints we’ve had as a business. You can see our reporting from January to March 2024 below.
In summary: how we did last quarter
Complaints received
| Time period | Total complaints received | Complaints per 100k customers |
|---|---|---|
| January to March 2024 | 141,257 | 2,331 |
| October to December 2023 | 135,601 | 2,228 |
Complaints resolved
| Time period | Total complaints resolved | Complaints per 100k customers |
|---|---|---|
| January to March 2024 | 132,434 | 2,186 |
| October to December 2023 | 142,184 | 2,336 |
Time to resolve complaints
| Time period | By end of next working day | Within 8 weeks |
|---|---|---|
| January to March 2024 | 61.6% | 90.9% |
| October to December 2023 | 54.0% | 83.5% |
Making things better
It’s important to us that customers see how we’re looking to improve. Each quarter, we publish some of the reasons for the complaints we've had, and what we're doing to make things better.
1. Customer Service
Customer service-related complaints cover a number of issues. We know it’s frustrating when things go wrong and if we don’t put things right as quickly as we should. We want to make sure you can get through to the best person to deal with your issue, without having to be passed around multiple departments.
The progress we're making
We know it's frustrating for you when you can’t get through to the right team to deal with your complaint. We’re improving the routing of our telephone lines to make sure you get through to the correct department to deal with your issue.
Where you don’t need to speak to someone, we’re working on making those routes better. Meaning we’re making it easier for you to update us with meter readings, or make a payment. This means we’re able to answer your calls quicker if you do need to speak to a member of the team.
Finally, we’re continuing to upskill our complaint handlers to solve more complex issues, which means we don’t need to pass as many accounts to other teams. This reduces the time it takes to fix things when they go wrong
2. Billing and meter readings - unrelated with meter type
We’re working on ways to improve our billing experience, from meter read submission through to payment.
We also continue to recommend customers have a smart meter installed wherever possible. Smart meters automatically send us your meter readings, meaning you get more accurate bills and better visibility of your energy use in real time.
The progress we're making
Using feedback from our customers, we’re redesigning our bills to make the information about their meter readings and energy use clearer and easier to understand.
We’re helping advisors to support our customers by explaining their bills, including how their final balance has been worked out.
We’re improving how we estimate your energy use when we don’t have actual meter reads. We know estimated bills can cause confusion for customers who haven’t got, or can’t get a smart meter. This could mean disputes over how much they’re using, issues when switching supplier or unexpected changes in their bills. By improving how we estimate their use we can give customers a more consistent and accurate billing experience.
We’re also introducing more ways for customers without a smart meter to read and submit meter readings themselves, keeping their bills on track.
3. Payment issues
Each year we process millions of payments for our customers so it's crucial we get this right. From January - March customer refunds, payment top up cards and Direct Debit reviews were the top reasons for payment related customer complaints.
The progress we're making
For our customers on our Pay as you Go tariff we’ve expanded our top up card stock to additional outlets. And we’ve worked with Paypoint & Payzone to make sure their teams are trained to register replacement cards. Over the past 3 months, we’ve continued to make improvements to our top-up performance, which has greatly reduced the number of failures being seen. We'll continue this drive across the rest of the year.
We received a lot of feedback about how many communications we sent out about Direct Debits. We’ve now reduced the number of comms to just one, making sure that it contains all the information that we need to share. Next, we’re looking at improving the Direct Debit experience for customers moving from variable to fixed energy tariffs.
We also understand how important it is to receive a refund when your accounts are in credit so we’ve worked hard to make sure we’re processing refunds within 2 days of them being requested. We’ve also provided more guidance to our front line teams on raising these correctly to prevent any delays in getting these sent to customers.
Keeping you updated
We’ve committed to updating this page every 3 months, so that we’re transparent about how we can do better for our customers. We can’t promise to always get it right. But we can promise that we’ll learn and improve.