Customers are at the heart of our business

We continued on our journey of delivering a great customer experience by focusing on 'doing the right things', 'doing things right', and 'doing things efficiently'.

As a result, we consolidated our second place position for customer satisfaction in the 2007 JD Power Associates study on UK electricity and gas supplier customer satisfaction, and made significant headway in terms of lowering the number of energywatch complaints made against us.

This was achieved on the back of some key initiatives. In 2006 we took a close look at our customer service, placing additional emphasis on billing accuracy and ensuring that all our call centres were UK-based. In addition to this, in 2007 we initiated industry awareness training to give all our customer service teams a platform from which to develop better processes and methods. We significantly reduced the number of new recruits into our call centres, preferring to concentrate on training and management of our existing people, thereby creating and developing a more stable and highly-skilled customer service team.

Energywatch has made changes to the statistical information about supplier performance, deciding to present the data on the basis of total consumer cases (incorporating complaints, inquiries and empowerment cases).The first report using this new method covered the period July 07 to September 07, with our company seeing an approximate 65% reduction in complaints for the remainder of the year.

Customer Complaints (number)

Customer Transfer Complaints (number)1
2004	2005	2006	2007*
3,292	2,953	1,032	208
Direct Selling Complaints (number)2
2004	2005	2006	2007*
324	132	66	2
Customer Account and Billing Complaints (number)3
2004	2005	2006	2007*
8,534	11,780	4,205	1,741

1Submitted by Energywatch under categories TR.1 to TR.10
2Submitted by energywatch under categories MA.1 to MA.6
3Identified as accounts and billing complaints by Powergen at point of receipt
* Energywatch made changes to the statistical information about supplier performance as previously detailed. However, the figure for 2007 has been adjusted to pre-July criteria to show comparable data year on year.

In October 2007 we took the decision to base all our corporate sales and customer service teams in one location. This move will bring our corporate sales and service teams closer together, with the aim of improving our customer experience. This move will result in the closing of our Ipswich office in 2008.

In our distribution business, we have customers who find it difficult to access our normal communications channels. So, in December 2007, we carried out a market research project amongst our ethnic minority customers, focusing on the most widely used languages in our region - Gujurati, Urdu and Hindi - to discover what their expectations would be should a power cut happen. We assessed the effectiveness of our current communication methods and what improvements could be made in the future. Many of our current communications received strong praise. As well as our Braille and 'Language Line' initiatives, we also offer multi-lingual planned/emergency interruption cards, and web pages providing information and contact details for customers whose first language is not English. We now offer web pages in Arabic, Punjabi, Hindi, Mandarin, Urdu and Gujurati.

Our distribution business has also started working with seven Talking Newspapers for the Blind and visually impaired in its region. One of these, Vista, provides three-minute information recordings. We've established working alliances with hospital radio stations and have produced 40-second adverts to promote the Priority Services Register for vulnerable customers who rely on their electricity supply for medical reasons, such as continuous treatment.

Our distribution business remains the only UK network operator to offer a live website showing our network map. Customers can use it to access detailed information about faults and the schedules of planned outages, including the estimated restoration times. Loss of supply details in real time include which part of the network is downand exactly how many customers, including the streets and postcodes, are affected. The interactive map is fed from live system data and operates on a 24 hour, 7 day a week basis.