Energy supplier rating - decision document on new customer service metrics and other updates
Citizens Advice provides free, independent, confidential and impartial advice to everyone on their rights and responsibilities. From 1 April 2014, Citizens Advice took on the powers of Consumer Futures to become the statutory representative for energy consumers across Great Britain. The Citizens Advice energy supplier rating serves as part of this statutory function.
First published in 2016, the star rating provides consumers with accessible information about energy supplier performance and enables consumers to make more informed switching decisions. It is published on our website and integrated into the results page of our price comparison website (PCW).
The key decisions we have made on updates to the customer service metric
are:
- To update the customer service metric in the rating to include email and social media response times.
- Not to include telephone ringbacks and dropped calls as new metrics in the rating.
- Not to include web chat as a metric at this stage, but we are continuing our investigations on how to include it in the near future.
- To adjust our proposed methodology for incorporating the new metrics into the rating (see table 1).
In addition to our decisions on updating the customer service metric, we have used this update to confirm the following changes:
- To include the EUK Vulnerability Charter in the customer commitments metric.
- To change the reporting period for Energy Ombudsman data in the rating from acceptance date to completion date.
- To align our switching metric with Ofgem’s proposed approach for the Guaranteed Standards on switching.
- In the event of a supplier failure, to remove the supplier from the star rating and adjust other supplier rankings accordingly.
- To provide clarification around the exclusions for the call waiting time metric.
Responses [
2.8 mb] to the consultation have been published alongside the decision.