One of the mysteries of life for me is how certain companies can be so utterly useless at their core operations, and yet still manage to stay in business. Or for that matter, how they can become so completely divorced from their customer base that they end up accessible only by a nightmare combination of call centres and holding queues, designed to deter people from persisting to the bitter end.
The reason for the cynicism is the latest episode in the saga of changing electricity suppliers. I’d always niavely assumed that because there was an industry-wide process that the regulator had put into place, the process had to be reasonably robust – and that attempting to chance supplier would actually work. I should have known.
The incumbant supplier around these parts used to be Yorkshire Electricity (unsuprisingly), but they’ve long since been swallowed up by the behemoth that is npower. When we moved here, it became pretty quickly apparent that one of the joys of remaining with the incumbant regional supplier is a tariff that would make a debt-collector blush – 14.6p per unit, anyone? So about the first thing that I did was put a transfer into action, intending the account to end up with Powergen – still crap customer service, but cheaper.
That took something like three months before it unravelled completely – one long saga of right hand not knowing what left hand was doing, letters not going out, records not being updated etc etc etc. So after completely losing it to the point of calling the MD’s office, it looked like things were being sorted out, to the extent that on 31st December the account would be transferred and npower would be no more than a distant (and expensive) memory.
December came and went, and there was silence on the part of the electricity suppliers. It’s not at the top of my exciting things to do list, so I basically forgot about the whole situation – until I got a bill this morning from npower. Confused, a call to their customer “service” centre (and I use the word “service” in the loosest possible sense) quickly established that as far as they were concerned, I was their customer and they were my supplier, and that wasn’t going to change any time soon. There’d been no request to switch the account – as far as they were concerned I was a happy loyal customer and I’d be staying.
“That’s a load of bollocks,” thinks I, and so I call Powergen. Bollocks it is – they’d tried to switch the account and had been rebuffed. npower should have told me that there’d been a failed attempt to switch the account because they’re the only organisation with the right to talk to me as a customer. So back to npower’s tinkly hold music, and another agent has a different story – they couldn’t release the account because there was an estimated reading. Were they under any obligation to tell me of this? Not a chance – that was Powergen’s job, as it was Powergen that was trying to switch the account.
Which leaves me with a bill about 40% bigger than it should be, and a homicidal glint in my eye as I contemplate the satisfaction to be had from seeing their respective ‘customer service directors’ heads on sticks.
