The energy industry is under increased scrutiny over its customer services - customers already unhappy with increasing energy costs are also disgruntled with the level of customer service they feel they're receiving from their energy companies.
Customers no longer just want to buy gas and electricity from their energy company, they also want products such as boiler repair service and home insulation services. They also want their queries resolved in an instant, provide their own meter reading, see their latest bill and then make a payment – and all through one interaction with us.
We’ve made a huge investment - £200m – in the very core of our customer services; this summer we’ll begin moving our entire customer base to a whole new system. This commitment to invest in new technology shows npower’s dedication to improving its customer service. The new system will greatly improve customer experience, but we’re also aware that such a huge transition brings with it the potential risk of disruption to customers during the change so checks will be put in place to ensure minimum disruption to our customers.
Plus, we're a lot quicker in answering calls - mystery shopping research conducted in May 2010 by independent market research agency Ipsos MORI, discovered that when 100 customer service calls were made to each of the six main suppliers, covering 'other queries,' 'moving home' and 'prepayment queries', npower had the shortest average response time for answering telephone calls from customers. Our contact centres have been rated 29th out of the top 50 in a recent contact centre survey by the Times - and in a recent Which? investigation (Jan 2011) we answered customers’ phone calls more quickly than our competitors.
We have more than halved our complaint levels and we resolve over 80% of complaints in our very first contact with the customer.
Even so, we're keen to do better. We care about how our customers feel about what we do and so we carry out our own monthly customer satisfaction surveys to check how we're doing. We listen to what our customers tell us and act on it - for instance, we've made our bills easier to read. They have since been endorsed by the Plain English Campaign and we also received the Plain English Campaign’s Crystal Mark.
www.plainenglish.co.uk/news/plain-english-npower-bill.html
www.npower.com/web/at_home/customer_service/index.htm
www.npowerjobs.com/Customer-administration/Default.aspx
