August 2015 omnibus survey of micro-businesses: summary report

Citizens Advice decided to investigate whether micro-businesses would be interested in greater access to pricing information, using price comparison websites and stronger controls on brokers. We wanted to understand whether the CMA’s proposed remedies would promote market engagement and enable consumers to obtain the most suitable contracts at reasonable prices.The research also aimed to establish how the smallest non-domestic consumers were currently engaging with the market, and in what ways. In particular we were interested in understanding how confident micro-businesses felt when engaging with the market and how strongly or otherwise they believed greater transparency and new ways of obtaining price and contract information would improve their interactions. We commissioned Populus to speak to 1,000 micro-businesses (via an online survey) on our behalf and the key results from this Omnibus survey are summarised here. [ 1 mb]