We sell electricity, gas and other services to residential, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and industrial & commercial customers and strive to deliver a first-class service to them all.

Customers can contact us free, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year through our automated system, helping them to speak to the right person who will sort out any queries they may have. We also have a dedicated team to take the hassle of managing customers' accounts during the stressful time when they move home. We want to give all our customers excellent service and advice. Satisfied customers are likely to stay with us and trust other services we offer. Customer research
We continually monitor customer satisfaction. From calls to our contact centres, 500 customers a week are asked for their views, which takes a few minutes. This allows us spot any problems and deal with them appropriately and quickly.     Since early 2002, Powergen has researched customer satisfaction through calls to our contact centres. 500 customers a week are asked to take part in a simple telephone survey.   We recognise that we need to improve our customer service and our aims are:  

• To deliver excellent customer service through accurate and timely billing and offering many ways to pay
• To provide employees with good communication, training and development to help them to deal with customer enquiries
• To minimise costs and improve efficiency while maintaining quality customer service
• To work effectively with outsourced partners to ensure excellent customer service
• To recruit staff to maintain service levels
• To reduce the number of customer complaints.
  

Complaint handling

We deal with all complaints seriously. Our customer service team deals with all complaints and makes sure action is taken to resolve every issue. We regularly analyse complaints to highlight weaknesses in our systems and the way we work. This lets our service liaison team detect trends and work with relevant departments to tackle the main causes.   This is a summary of our performance in 2003:  

Account and billing complaints

• Both gas and electricity complaints rose during 2003, with gas well above industry average and electricity tracking at the end of the year at industry average.
• Due to this increase, the "all" account and billing complaints figure continues to rise above the industry average.
• Transfer complaints
• Transfer complaints across the industry have been dropping since early in 2003.
• Nevertheless, over the last few months of 2003 Powergen gas has seen a dramatic improvement, with complaints falling below average for the first time since early in 2003.
  

Direct selling complaints

• As with transfer complaints, direct selling complaints have been falling across the industry since early in 2003, and we've been following this trend (albeit above the industry average).
• A dramatic improvement in gas has seen gas direct selling complaints fall in line with the industry average.
• This fall in gas, compared with the general industry improvement for electricity, sees "all" complaints for Powergen narrow the gap on the industry average.

All in all, the handling of gas customers has improved dramatically as far as selling to them and transferring to and from us. Our main area of concern is billing. We recognise this and understand clearly the reasons billing issues arise. We have plans in place to directly tackle our billing issues. However, we also have new challenges to face in 2004. All customers are being moved onto a single customer management system and we have invested heavily in preparation for this change to ensure minimum impact on customers. The benefits for customers will be clear, simple, accurate bills. Our complaint levels are too high and we take this very seriously. The plans we have in place aim to achieve lower complaints levels and improve customer service during 2004.