Utility Week

Company profile Npower's annus horribilis 2013 was not a great year for the company that had vowed in January to rid itself of the customer satisfaction problems that had plagued it for years, as Mathew Beech reports. 12 | 31st January - 6th February 2014 | utILIty WeeK 74.2 complaints per 100,000. Despite the growth in complaints, Roger Hattam, Npower's director of domestic retail business, said the company's priority is to resolve the problems – it has 800 extra staff working to resolve the issue – and that it is still targeting the top spot in the consumer satisfaction polls. He added: "We're looking at every single thing we do – and we're changing our processes, our systems – and the very culture of Npower. It'll take time but it's time to take a fresh look at Npower." How do tHe big six eNergy suppliers compare oN complaiNts HaNdliNg iN 2013? 300 250 Weighted cases per 100,000 customers 200 150 100 50 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Npower Scottish Power Eon Aug Sep British Gas EDF Energy Jul Source: Consumer Futures 0 SSE All Npower customer complaiNts 202.5 July-September 2012 253.1 July-September 2013 0 100 200 Complaints per 100,000 customers 300 Source: Consumer Futures R ewind to January 2013. Confident and smiling, new Npower boss Paul Massara commits himself to making his company number one for customer satisfaction. That's a big promise in the face of rising energy bills and widespread customer dissatisfaction with utilities. Twelve months later, Npower is bottom of the league of the big six, with spiralling customer complaints, a bruising row with the regulator, and a parent company that has bigger issues on its mind. What went wrong – and what will Massara do next? Things reached a low point last month, when Massara was compelled to write to the firm's 3.4 million customers, begging their pardon for a record-breaking poor performance that saw complaints increase by 25 per cent. This came at the end of a torrid year for the supplier. The customer complaints fiasco and billing woes came on top of a £3.5 million fine from Ofgem for mis-selling, the offloading of 770,000 customer accounts as the company got to grips with sweeping reforms in the energy market, and the shelving of the Tilbury biomass project because of "difficult market conditions". Meanwhile, on the Continent, parent company RWE is struggling with tumbling profits and a share price that fell from a high of €39.90 in January to a low of €20.80 by the start of September, ending the year at €27.69. Npower's customer experience problems stem from a new billing system that replaced three separate regional systems. Teething problems resulted in some customers not getting bills for up to a year, while others received inaccurate bills or bills for accounts that weren't their own. Massara's letter in December apologised for the poor customer service, but asserted that "good progress" had been made in resolving the issues, which Npower has said should be completely resolved by the spring. The billing switchover no doubt contributed to the number of complaints per 100,000 customers increasing to 253.1 between July and September last year – up 25  per cent on the previous quarter – and more than three times higher than the next big six supplier, EDF Energy, which recorded

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