Energy companies tardy in answering customer service calls

Energy companies are experiencing an avalanche of 60 million phone calls a year to their customer service departments, according to consumer watchdog Which?

An invetsigation by the watchdog shows that, on average, its researchers were left waiting on hold for anything between 21 seconds (Ebico) to 17 minutes and 5 seconds (Npower) before we could speak to someone.

The shortest waiting time recorded in one single call was 4 seconds (Ebico), but Npower had the longest waiting time, with the Which? mystery caller waiting for 29 minutes before getting through.

Three in 10 ten consumers (31%) say that being left on hold for long periods before speaking to someone is one of their biggest bugbears when calling their energy provider’s customer service, according to the watchdog.

Which? called 16 energy companies 12 times each at set times of the day to find out just how long customers might be left on hold. It recorded how long it took between finishing dialling the customer service number to getting through to an adviser and then calculated an average waiting time for each company.

Only six of the suppliers called had an average waiting time of less than two minutes, including just one of the major six energy companies (EDF Energy).

Which? executive director, Richard Lloyd, said: “It’s unacceptable that some energy suppliers are leaving their customers dangling on the phone for anything up to half an hour.

“If energy companies want to restore trust in the industry they must work harder to make people feel confident that customer service is a top priority, and stop putting sales over service.

“We’d like to see calls to customer service centres being picked up within two minutes.”

Of the six major energy providers, our findings showed that all but Eon were quicker to answer calls to their sales number than calls to their customer services.