With energy costs soaring, no one welcomes the arrival on the doormat of their gas or electricity bill. However, worse still, is when there is something wrong with the bill and you know that you have to embark on the tortuous journey of querying it.How many times have you phoned your energy supplier and been passed from pillar to post before finding the right person to speak to, and how often do suppliers promise to phone you back and never do?
Now, for the lucky customers who use Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), this could be a thing of the past. The energy company is taking customer satisfaction seriously and is promising to pay £20 each time they fail to deliver on five main areas of customer care.
They undertake:
not to transfer you more than once without your agreement
to call you back as promised
to pass you to a manager if that is what you want
to offer support with your bill if required
to help save you money
There is no limit to the number of times customers can claim the £20, although it must be claimed within ten days of the failure in service. The money will appear as a credit on the customer’s next bill and if you use prepayment cards the sum will be shown next time you top up.
Alistair Phillips-Davies of SSE has acknowledged that customer care in the past has been less than good but says that the company’s new charter and guarantee shows that SSE wants to be “more than the best of a bad bunch”. He hopes that the message will be heard by the whole of the industry that it is time to “transform for the better what customers experience”.
