Cheers for the lengthy reply.
You are basically saying don't use the big energy companies as they are not interested in customers service and its this lack of interest in customer service rather than how they operate it that leads to poor customer service?
With British Gas (who the general public contract with), they are Centrica and their prime business is retailing energy isn't it? opposed to production and distribution. You would think cusotmer service is fairly important to Centrica, if it isn't Centrica will forever struggle and eventaully disappear?
I would disagree slightly with the statement contacting customer services for a utility company is a rare event, maybe not common but it will happen at least once a year for most people, certainly with the unreliability of smart meters over a 5 year span, people also will switch, want DDs changing, move house etc. Poor customer service must impact on sales eventually?
It's not that they're not interested in customer services, it's just you can't resource for the peaks by employing an army of staff, and have hundreds if not thousands of bums on seats the rest of the time, and expect to make a decent profit at the same time. Telephone calls are extremely inefficient 1-2-1 form of customer service. When you speak to an agent on livechat, the reason they often take so long to reply is because they're serving 3-5 customers at once and have pre-typed responses to many queries and basic queries are usually filtered out by a chat assistant. Similar to email, they'll have an inbox and work on a number of queries at once because that person isn't there speaking to them now. Social media will have a software suite that will manage the various channels and queries, but for telephones you need one bum on one seat for each customer ringing at that point in time else you get queues, then everyone who gets through is mad and wants to complain because of the wait, which holds up the next call and it snowballs from there. WIth digital multi channel companies those colleagues can jump on the phones when need be but its hard to go from being a behemoth of a company to one that is agile, so most firms in m ost industries will employ just about the minimum possible to service people to a certain level. However a company can have shocking CS and people will still use them, just look at Evri and Yodel. DPD are a brilliant courier but if anything goes wrong they are an absolute nightmare to deal with. And British Gas in fact, who you are still with despite all this. Its either through brand loyalty, fear of the unknown, the belief that any other company will be the same or any other manor of reasons. Octopus has phone channels, and I imagine people do write to them even, but they're a very digital friendly company and you can do most things yourself in their app or website, but they also make their data available via API so you can get third party applications that will show you how much youre forecast to use that month and present it to you in easy graphs etc. You don't have to use it, but it exists. I imagine if I tweeted BG or SSE at 8pm on a sunday I'd probably get a tweet back in a few weeks time asking me to call them.
Yes Centrica own British Gas, just like they own many other companies - Centrica makes it money from a variety of streams with half of the group profits coming from upstream. Centrica itself is essentially an Oil and Gas company, that does energy generation and has British Gas. BG is fairly unique in the energy supply industry because they do pretty much everything, at a cost roughly twice of what you can get elsewhere, and people pay it. I suspect if they were called French Gas they wouldn't enjoy the same luck. They do boiler installs, boiler cover, hive smart heating systems, they have a pretty large market share in the UK yet they're completely crap in most regards, really expensive for their cover and installs, but people still use them. They struggle to retain their staff too as they don't pay great wages so the experienced lads generally strike out on their own. If BG didn't do all the extra contracts, boiler installs etc then like most energy firms they would struggle to make a profit. Centrica however isn't going to deal because british gas has crap customer services - other energy suppliers will be in the same boat and, crap as BG are, they aren't even in the bottom 5 in a lot of rankings
That said, as you can see from the above, they're starting to lose ground. Smaller challenger firms are starting to appear. Some are better than others, but they're able to interact with customers better.
Octopus lowest complaints per 100k customers since joining the big 6. What is surprising here is Octopus is now, in an update to the graph above, on course to be the second largest energy provider in the UK after it's acquisition of Shell energy and rescue of Bulb. So it is possible to have good service and a lot of customers, but it has to be the focus of the company and for many it isn't.
As for contacting a supplier, most customers do not. Majority of energy supplier cause for contact, even smart meter customers, is because of financial difficulties or billing enquiries. Those that are not in financial difficulties may contact if they need to change a DD etc but majority will just do that online. People have a view that smart meters are unreliable because of a very vocal minority but majority of smart meter customers don't have any issues with them. When we would analyse complaint data, there were more complaints about call waiting times and offshore call centres than there were about smart meters. Switching is done online, you don't need to contact your supplier unless you need your usage data, all of which is on your bills. Moving house online form or app, DD online or fire off an email for all of those. If you don't value your time then of course you can sit on the phone and wait for ages but banks aren't closing because people prefer to go into branches - because they don't. Banks are closing because the massive majority of people don't want to go into town and go to the bank to pay in a cheque, so they use an app, then they end up with a tiny proportion of people using it. Same with Energy, and many other industries. People would rather be able to request their own credit balance refund, download their own statement in PDF, change their own Direct debit or just provide a new address. If you want to change energy supplier its a 2-3 minute job using an online form and they do all the work for you. Gone are the days of door to door salesmen - although you still get utility warehouse who are an awful company and a pyramid scheme in disguise as they don't pay their sales people a salary.
I would say in the last 10 years I have contacted my energy firm maybe 25 times, and majority of that probably with Octopus as its so easy to do, and my last supplier GEUK who were so small that you could ring them and they would answer the phone and it would be the guy that just emailed you.
They were very accessible when they had shops across the country. Change is not always progress.
Except when it is. Even if you had to wait 20 minutes in a live chat queue, or on the phone, that is surely better than having to go to town to a shop, park, wait to speak to someone and back home? I presume you are talking way before direct debits existed - so are you genuinely saying you'd rather pay your bill at the counter and speak to someone rather than it just being taken automatically off your bill? If so that's wild. I've absolutely got better things to be doing with my time than going to the gas shop, and I'd rather my bill be lower because they're not supporting a retail network without the clout to compete with specialised retailers like Curry's. Those shops were all closed because they were loss making then, it would be worse now.
