The Big Six energy suppliers are in the news again. It’s not good news, again.
Over the past few years, the United Kingdom’s six major energy suppliers have popped up more and more frequently in newspapers and on television, and more often than not, it hasn’t been good news for them. While it may be subjective and unfair to lump all six of these companies into one bracket and criticise them all as if they’re one big Murdoch-like empire, they do currently control 95% of the UK energy market. In addition, a recent inquiry launched by Ofgem states that while the Big Six may not be colluding on prices to prevent competition it has found “possible tacit co-ordination” on the size and timing of national price rises.
While the Daily Mail may be more widely known for keeping us all up to date on the Kardashian’s latest scandal, and over the top sensationalist headlines, this recent article looking at how long existing Big Six customers are left on hold during phone calls, does reveal some interesting statistics about what most energy customers in the UK are currently dealing with.
The investigation found that on average, existing customers were left on hold for 40 minutes across the six suppliers, with the longest hold time for a new customer only ever reaching 4 minutes and 51 seconds. Scottish Power was the worst offender, taking a rather ridiculous 48 minutes to answer the phone to an existing customer.
To make things worse, the Mail also reported that “British Gas, E.ON, EDF Energy, npower, Scottish Power and SSE- use controversial ’08’ numbers, which are free from a landline but cost up to 40p a minute from a mobile.” Now while we will never claim to be perfect here at Glide, we do know the difference between good and poor customer service. Waiting 40 minutes on the phone before speaking to someone you pay hundreds of pounds a year to fuel your home is poor customer service.
In light of such statistical absurdity, we decided to have a look at our own call times to see how we faired. During the month of may, we answered over 2000 calls to a range of existing and new customers and 98.2% of those calls were answered in under 60 seconds, with the longest remaining call being answered in under 2 minutes, and an average waiting time of 11 seconds.
Of course, taking data from a single month will never tell the full story and I’m sure we have taken longer to answer the phone in the past, but it does show that we have the resources to deal with customer questions in a timely manner and don’t differentiate between the importance of new and existing customers.
Furthermore, rather than charging our customers 40p a minute from mobile phones, we use an 03 number which is local rate and inclusive of any minutes you have in your mobile contract; and we’ll happily call customers back if we need to.
With the Big Six controlling such a vast majority of the UK energy market, it could be argued that they receive a much higher volume of calls and don’t have the resources in place to answer the phones fast enough while still making a profit, but even so, 48 minutes on hold really is absurd.