Customer Service

We recognise that providing a high quality of service to all our customers is critical to the success of our business and this remained a high priority throughout 2011. We aim to provide all our customers with high quality service, market leading energy products and to protect the most vulnerable. We continue to invest in our people, systems and processes to improve the quality of our service and we are already seeing some benefits from our £200 million investment in customer services – in 2011, we continued to see a reduction in our complaint levels across our customer base¹.

Listening to customers

As part of our Customer Charter, we place extra emphasis on listening to our customers and acting on the feedback that we receive. We speak to customers directly, carry out monthly satisfaction surveys and encourage customers to use feedback forms.

Through our Customer Stakeholder Council, established in 2010, we get direct input and advice on a broad range of issues so that we can improve our customer experience.

Members of our Customer Stakeholder Council come from a wide range of organisations that represent our customers, including Consumer Focus, Which? and National Energy Action. Our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Commercial Officer also attend the quarterly meetings, to listen to the feedback and suggestions that these organisations have to offer us.

In 2011, we also invited members of our Customer Stakeholder Council to speak at our annual senior managers’ conference to reinforce our focus on customers. The members that attended provided an external perspective on the steps we are taking to improve our customer service and meet our customers’ needs.

Through our Brighter Energy Debate website and npower’s Twitter feed, we also offer a forum for anyone to ask questions about the energy industry in general and our business, with npower employees answering their questions directly.

In 2011, we continued to part-fund the Energy Best Deal programme along with other energy suppliers. The programme, which is run by Citizens Advice, is delivered through group sessions and targets both domestic energy consumers and frontline Citizens Advice workers. It aims to raise awareness about reducing energy costs by changing tariff or suppliers and educates participants about the help that is available from both energy suppliers and Government for those who are struggling to pay their energy bills.

Through the Energy Retailers’ Association we also support the Home Heat Helpline – a free phone number for any consumer to call to speak to independent advisors on energy-related issues.

Investing in customer services

We are also committed to improving our systems and processes and investing in new technology and training for our employees to improve our services to customers.
In 2011, we launched our new ₤200 million customer service system that will bring together all customer-related processes under one platform, to enable us to respond to customer queries quickly and more efficiently. In 2011, we began training our customer service teams in the new technology and to migrate customer accounts onto the system. To date around 700 people in our customer service team have been trained and by December 2011 over 600,000 customer accounts had been transferred onto the new platform. In 2012, the rollout will continue and will enable us to further enhance our customers’ experience and expand our online account management services for customers.

¹ Third party complaints reduced across our residential and business customers