Utilita customers transfer £2m in credit balances  

Utilita says it has seen around £2 million worth of customer credit being transferred between electricity and gas accounts following the launch of a new self-service feature on its app.

The prepayment meter (PPM) specialist supplier recently gave smart-installed dual-fuel customers the ability to use the app’s ‘Savings’ feature to allow them to move credit between meters without the need to telephone the supplier.

It said the new feature was prioritised following the launch of the government’s Energy Bills Support Scheme (EBSS).

Utilita’s chief technology officer, Ian Burgess, told Utility Week: “We were getting thousands of calls into our contact centre asking for balances to be transferred from electricity to gas. The industry regulated stance is that the EBSS payments have to be paid to electricity meters but obviously, during winter, a lot of customers want that to be on their gas meter.

“The only way you could provision that is for customers to call in and for us to do that via our contact centre. It’s already a very busy time of year, a lot of our customers are calling in on the back of the energy crisis and hardship. So us being able to facilitate that via our app certainly became our top priority.”

In the 10 days following the new feature’s launch on 2 December, the company saw around 110,000 transfers, totalling about £2 million.

Asked about the overall cost benefits to the business, Burgess responded by saying the true benefits come from being able to reprioritse customer service agents.

He added: “It’s less about the cost per se, it’s being able to reprioritise those agents on real hardship cases as opposed to mundane tasks…it is more about making sure we’re acting in the best interests of our customers.

“Clogging up the phone line with customers just wanting to transfer credit from one meter to another probably isn’t the best use of their time.”