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Responsibility for finding “gap sites” in the business market falls to water retailers
As many as one in 10 customers could be missing from the water market’s central database, retailers have claimed, urging wholesalers to follow the example of Anglian Water and pay them to identify missing customers.
Retailer Everflow said it has found that, on average, data for 8-10 per cent of customers is missing from the database. Customer services director Josh Gill insisted wholesalers must follow the lead of those that are “more progressive” like Anglian Water, which has put cash incentives in place of £350 per ‘gap site’ – the term for a missing customer.
Gill told Utility Week’s sister title Water.Retail that, without incentives, it was “not worth retailer’s time” to process gap sites – meaning customers could be left out of the market for the long-term. He said: “Bearing in mind that the average margin for a customer is be about 8 per cent in the market, where is the incentive for a retailer to pursue these sites?”
Market Operator Services Limited (MOSL) insisted that data quality has been a “continual area of focus” throughout the market opening process. “The initial challenge ahead of market opening was one of data compliance, in which water companies were required to align their data to the formats set out in the market codes,” said chief executive Ben Jeffs. “Given that this data had been collected over many years and extracted from a myriad of different, often legacy, systems, this has been no small feat. The result is that more than 1.4 million premises have been loaded into the central system to enable the market to open on time on 1 April.”
A spokesperson for Ofwat said: “It is great that there is so much interest in the new market – with retailers entering and exiting, and thousands of customers already switching and renegotiating to find the right deal for them. Retailers and wholesalers are working together to identify and fill in any gaps on system, but we have not seen any evidence to back the assertion that 10 per cent of customers are in ‘gap sites’.
“But the key point is customers won’t lose out. If a customer wants to switch or renegotiate and in the process finds they are not on the listed on the database – the retailer is obligated to inform the wholesaler so that customer can be registered and switched.”
The responsibility for cleaning up patchy or incomplete data now falls on the retailers, and this comes at a cost. Waterscan managing director Neil Pendle said he believes the market data is fit for purpose, but the “real issue” is that the burden for cleaning the data falls on the retailers and not the wholesalers, which prepared and loaded it in the first place. And ADSM director Gareth Stevens warned that the corrective action comes at a financial cost to retailers, and that some may come to realise is “more significant” than they originally anticipated.
Read the full version of this article in Water.Retail
To coincide with water market opening, Faversham House has launched Water.Retail – a new fortnightly, newsletter-style publication under the auspices of Utility Week – which will connect brokers to wholesalers, retailers and customers, and provide water retail professionals with high-value business intelligence and market insights.
Sign up to Water.Retail now and get the first three issues for free
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