Performance Report 2004
Ambition 1: Customers
For a customer-facing business a high standard of customer service is absolutely crucial. We have the ambition to 'care more for our customers and continually improve customer experience'.
Within this section we describe the many ways in which we reach customers, how we provide customer services and the way in which we measure the standard of that service.
The significant events of 2004, namely price rises and service reliability, are described in later sections. The ways in which we listen to our customers is described in the section detailing our stakeholder dialogue.
We serve our residential customers at all stages of delivering energy to their homes: when creating a physical connection from the network to their homes, when reading their meters, when handling a bill enquiry, when responding to complaints or, in cases of emergency, power cuts. The challenge for EDF Energy is to ensure a consistently high standard of service.
During 2005. we will conclude the re-structuring of our metering business, ECS. Our metering staff will then operate under the EDF Energy brand and will be in a position to offer additional services to our customers whilst no longer carrying out general metering work for other suppliers.
We remain committed to our UK customer contact centres. We believe that our customers will be best served by those who understand our customers’ own communities and that a 100% UK-based customer support service is therefore best for our customers. We have customer contact centres in Doxford (near Sunderland), Exeter, and Hove, and smaller, more specialist centres in Plymouth and Worthing.
In 2004, we received the Customer Service Award from the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the National Customer Service Disability Award.
During 2005, we will investigate a number of ways in which we might be able to offer additional internet services to our customers.
We aim to be the best service provider in the utility sector by 2007. We measure the quality of our customer service using a number of external indices, two of which are particularly focused on residential customers:
Any customer complaint is a real concern. We are working hard to reduce the number of complaints we receive and to ensure that when we do receive complaints they are resolved as efficiently as possible, and with minimum disruption for the customer.
Complaint levels peaked in March-April 2004 and then fell steadily throughout the year. This peak was due to a small number of problems experienced during integration of our retail brands to one computer system. By the end of the year we were once again performing better than the industry average on sales and customer service, but below average on transfers. This will be a priority during 2005.
Complaints in the metering business were just 2.4 per 100,000 jobs.
