“We want to care more for our customers and continually improve customer experience.”

Customer service – care more

We are committed to providing excellent customer service and, for this reason, we maintain our customer contact centres in the UK. We measure our standard of residential customer service through the independent energywatch league tables, where we continue to demonstrate performance improvement.

During 2004, we undertook the migration of 100,000 business customer accounts to a monthly, rather than quarterly, billing system. The result will be greater billing transparency for our business customers.

Service reliability

EDF Energy is the largest distributor of electricity in the UK, with nearly 20 million people reliant upon our networks. We measure our performance using two key indicators: customer minutes lost per connected customer and customer interruptions per 100 customers. Our performance in 2004 was an improvement on that of 2003.

Our networks were affected by three major storms in 2004. Having developed a comprehensive action plan in the wake of the problems experienced during the storms of 2002, our co-ordinated response minimised disruption in 2004. All 180,000 customers affected by the July 2004 storm had their supplies restored within 36 hours.

Price changes

We produce enough electricity to cover the demand of our residential customers and we meet the needs of our business customers by trading on the energy markets. Between January and September 2004, the winter forward prices for electricity and gas rose by 32% and 38% respectively. This prompted us to raise our tariffs by 10.8% for electricity and 8.3% for gas. This was not a decision we took lightly, as any price rise can affect customer retention and can push more households into fuel poverty. With this in mind, we developed a number of specific products designed to ease the burden, including a capped price product and a price change exemption for most vulnerable customers.

Fuel poverty

A household is defined as 'fuel poor' if it spends more than 10% of its available income to achieve an adequate heating regime. Tackling fuel poverty is one of our most important social responsibilities. The links in this section lead to specific initiatives we have developed to tackle fuel poverty and includes information on our Priority Services Register and our award-winning London Warm Zone.