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Npower is unlikely to meet its chief executive’s aspiration to top the energy sector’s customer service surveys by the end of this year, a company spokesman has admitted.
Paul Massara stepped into the role of chief executive at the beginning of 2013, promising that the company would climb from the bottom of the customer service league tables to the top in just two years. But the company’s business relations manager Dan Meredith told Utility Week that he would be “very surprised” if this was achieved.
“It was always an aspirational target,” Meredith said.
Npower has been dogged by customer service woes following the introduction of a new billing system which resulted in inaccurate and heavily delayed customer bills in 2013. As a result Massara was forced to make a public apology to Npower’s 3.4 million customers, and the company was ordered to pay a fine of £3.5 million to Ofgem.
The company was still rated the worst for customer service at the beginning of 2015 by consumer watchdog Which?, and on top of this Massara faced German press reports that parent company RWE was prepared to replace him due to poor performance.
Meredith was quick to “categorically deny” the reports, adding that the supply business as a whole has seen strong progress over the past year, particularly in the business energy market, while the household market is “an anomaly”.
Although the company is unlikely to replicate its business supply success in the residential market by the end of the year Meredith said this “shouldn’t be taken as a failure”.
“[W]e won’t stop working towards it until we are there,” he said.
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