Hanging on the telephone

Customer service in the energy market is in urgent need of reform

Danny Magill
We are Citizens Advice
3 min readAug 31, 2023

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At this point, you’re probably aware that the UK’s energy market is in the grips of a historic crisis. But even if you’ve avoided its worst effects, an aspect of the crisis that nobody is immune to is failing customer service.

A slippery slope

So how bad have things got? Citizens Advice’s joint survey with Ofgem on consumer perceptions of the energy market looks into how far standards have fallen over the past few years. It shows that 26% of respondents found reaching their supplier difficult from October to December of 2022, up from 14% from October to December 2019.

The survey also shows us that consumers who need the most help from their suppliers are also the most likely to find it difficult to get in touch with them. This includes prepayment meter customers, people with long-term health problems or disabilities, people on low incomes, and people who don’t have access to the Internet.

The Citizens Advice Star Rating, which tracks suppliers’ customer service, paints a similar picture. Average scores for suppliers have been in decline for the last 3 years. Average call wait times have almost doubled from under 3 minutes in the last 3 months of 2019 to nearly 6 minutes in the last 3 months of 2022, with some customers waiting for hours at peak times.

So what’s behind this decline?

Of course, the cost-of-living crisis has played a role. Higher prices, soaring debt and more people in need of help than ever before have all put strain on supplier’s resources. As have migrations of consumers from a wave of failed suppliers in 2021.

On the other hand, many suppliers’ issues around customer service go back beyond the cost-of-living crisis. We’re concerned that some suppliers have underinvested in customer service for a long time. For others, poor outcomes reflect a rush to digitalise customer service, by using chatbots and other digital tools instead of phone lines, which have left some people behind.

Why customer service matters

This might sound trivial compared to some of the worst outcomes we’ve seen in the energy market over the last few years. But at its core, customer service is about being able to contact the company that supplies an essential service when you most need them.

Every day our advisers help people who are at risk of serious harm but can’t get the help they need because of poor customer service. In the most serious cases, these failures can leave people forced to live in cold, dark homes.

This includes people like Lisa, a single parent with a newborn baby who got cut off her supply because she couldn’t top up her prepayment meter. Lisa should’ve been able to get in touch with her supplier to arrange some temporary credit. Instead, she spent hours trying to reach her supplier, leaving her with no idea of how or when she’d be able to get the lights back on.

Message Received

In August, Ofgem proposed several changes to the rules around customer service. This included ensuring that suppliers provide ways of contacting them that suit all customers needs, extending opening times outside of normal working hours and, for the first time, guidance on how long it should take suppliers to pick up the phone.

There are still questions over the best way to deliver proposals for freephone numbers for customers struggling to pay their bills, and a need for much more focus on customers who do not speak English. And, of course, all these reforms will need to be properly monitored and enforced.

At the end of the day, we want a functioning energy market where people in vulnerable circumstances can keep the lights on. People need to know that when they pick up the phone, their supplier will be there to help them. We know how to achieve this — all we need now is the commitment across industry to get there.

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Published in We are Citizens Advice

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