Fill the trust gap – or someone else will

Utility Week hosted a debate for chief executives from across energy and water last week, on the topic of customer trust and legitimacy. There were multiple points of view around the table, but one thing was clear: there are no easy answers. The leading minds in UK utilities are not agreed on how to re-establish trust, or indeed on how and why it was broken so badly in the first place.

There are disagreements, for example, on whether more choice would create more trust, allowing consumers to choose from 30 tariffs in the same way they’d browse loaves of bread in the supermarket; or whether all the customer wants is a minimal relationship with their energy providers and a working light switch.

Some things were clear. Water is in a better position with regards to customer legitimacy than energy; energy companies could learn from the customer challenge group process that fed in to PR14.

Networks must change their relationships with their customers – or, indeed, create those relationships, and take a visible role on the bill. And energy suppliers have been dealt a bad hand by government. They have been handed a huge programme of environmental subsidies that have not been properly explained to the customer base by the politicians who signed up to them; their structures and operations are a result of decisions by successive governments for which they are now being blamed; and they are increasingly used as whipping boys by politicians hungry for a quick fix without any consideration of the real issues.

And the reason they don’t stand up and say so?

Well, that became clear the next morning, when news broke that Eon had been slapped with a £12 million fine for mis-selling. Energy suppliers haven’t just shot themselves in the foot with shoddy sales practices, they’ve blown their legs off. The public is desperate for energy suppliers they can trust, and with the advent of smart meters, established customer-facing brands will soon be ready to fill the gap. Many of today’s vertically integrated energy suppliers will retreat to generation, with British Gas (the only supplier to avoid a mis-selling fine) most likely to be still standing in retail.