We continued to roll out major changes to our customer service operation during 2006. For historical reasons many of our customer relationships were previously handled for us by third parties, but we now have direct responsibility for most of our customers and a single system to manage them. This allows us to provide a more efficient and consistent service.

Complaints

energywatch monitors our performance and benchmarks us against other suppliers based on the number of customer complaints logged. In 2005 we were disappointed to fall to last place in energywatch's league table of customer complaints and made a public commitment to improve our performance. By the end of 2006, we were the second placed supplier. During 2006, we reduced our energywatch complaints by 63% as well as the average number of complaints received daily by 57%.

Transfer complaints*, Number

2004	2005	2006
3,292	2,953	1,032

* Submitted by Energywatch under categories TR.1 to TR.10

Direct selling complaints*, Number

2004	2005	2006
324	132	66

* Submitted by Energywatch under categories MA.1 to MA.6

Account and billing complaints*, Number

2004	2005	2006
8,534	11,780	4,205

* Identified as account and billing complaints by Powergen at point of receipt

2005 figure amended from 11,784 following data clarification

We also faced significant media criticism in 2005, with reports of inaccurate bills and inadequate responses from our call centres. Our own research, conducted in 2005 among customers in the process of leaving us for another supplier, showed that the numbers who were unhappy with the service they had received had risen since 2004.

We've responded to the criticism we have received about unresolved and badly handled complaints by introducing new procedures for handling them. In the past, customer service representatives did not have the authority to resolve a large number of commonly occurring issues, leading to frustration on the part of our customers. So we now include on our bills a message asking customers with problems to call a dedicated complaints line. These calls have priority and are now answered by a team of senior customer service representatives who have the authority to resolve most queries there and then. Any complaint that cannot be resolved this way is passed to our Customer Service Director, with a commitment to respond within 10 working days.

We have our own process for dealing with complaints made directly to energywatch. Every complaint is logged and allocated to the relevant part of the business for investigation. We respond to both to the customer and to energywatch within three working days, although further action may be needed depending on the nature of the complaint. Currently, an average of 67% of energywatch complaints are resolved by telephone, and 88% are resolved within 10 days.