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Npower and Scottish Power top poll for poor customer service

Customer service at Npower has been voted the worst in a poll conducted by MoneySavingsExpert.com, with 64 per cent of customers voting the customer service at the company as ‘poor’.

In the poll in which people answered the question “Is your energy company’s service any good?”, Npower received the third highest number of votes overall with 208, and the highest proportion of ‘poor’ votes with 134. Comparatively just 12 customers voted their service as ‘good’.

The results showed that Scottish Power had the second highest ‘poor’ rating at 57 per cent with 126 people choosing that option out of a total vote of 220 respondents. Only 39 people, or 18 per cent, voted the customer service they had received as ‘good’.

The results of the MoneySavingsExpert.com poll, which covered the last six months, follows a report by Citizens Advice in July which found that in January to March this year complaints against both Npower and Scottish Power doubled from the number made over the same period last year following the introduction of a new billing service at both companies.

A spokesperson for Npower said:”We’re really sorry if some of our customers feel we have let them down. We did see issues with our billing system, which affected how we looked after our customers. We’re now resolving these issues and so our customers will now begin to see real improvements in the service we offer them. Already, we have reduced the number of complaints we receive by nearly a third since earlier this year.”

A spokesperson for Scottish Power said: “We have transferred all of our accounts onto a new £200 million customer service system. This has been challenging and resulted in service related problems for some customers as accounts were brought up to date and bills issued. We sincerely apologise to any customers who have experienced difficulties during this period. We have set challenging improvement targets for the coming months and we have also brought in an additional 450 customer service advisors.”

By contrast Ovo energy was voted to have the best customer service of the 27 companies included in the poll. Out of 219 votes, 178 or 81 per cent of customers voted the customer service as ‘good’.

Of the Big 6 energy companies EDF was voted as having the best customer service with 100 customers, or 52 percent, voting it ‘good’ out of a total of 191 reponses.