Our letters to Ofgem

Our open letter to Ofgem includes some significant changes we’ve made:

• Ofgem has published their latest research on customer satisfaction with energy suppliers handling, carried out by Quadrangle.
• We’ve seen improvement in the percentage of residential customers who agree with us that their complaint has been resolved - from 51% in the original research (2014) to 68% in April 2016.
• The research noted that “E.ON domestic complainants are significantly more likely than average to be very satisfied with how their complaint was handled”.
• We resolved the largest percentage of complaints in the industry on the same day, within two days, within one week, up to one month and up to two months.
• We have the highest ‘maintained’ rate for Ombudsman cases (i.e. when the Ombudsman agrees with the resolution we have offered) in the industry. 

We wrote a letter to Ofgem in 2015, which talks about how satisfied our customers are with our complaints handling process. It’s a follow-up to the previous response, and gives an update on the progress we are making.

Some of the key highlights from the letter are:

• We’ve seen improvement in the percentage of residential customers who agree with us that their complaint has been resolved - from 54% in the original research to 63% in January 2015.
• Satisfaction with the resolution, and the number of customers who agree that we’ve treated them fairly, have both gone up by 14%.
• We’ve looked at micro businesses for the first time – with 57% of those customers agreeing that their complaint was resolved. The percentage of customers who agree we’ve treated them fairly is 50%.
• We’ve continued with our transformation programme and rolled out Handle with Care – which is our way to manage and resolve complaints – to all customer-facing staff.
• And we’ve also implemented the recommendations of Deloitte’s independent audit.

In 2014 Ofgem issued a statement regarding energy companies’ poor handling of consumer complaints. This was based on a study conducted by marketing research company GfK.

In this open letter in response to Ofgem, we've detailed the numerous steps we’ve made so far to improve the way we handle our customer complaints.

These steps include:

• Our ‘Handle with Care’ programme – over the last year we’ve changed and unified the way we handle all complaints across the business. We’ve also created new guides to help all our colleagues to create a consistent and helpful experience across the business.
• How the programme is delivering results – we’ve trained 4,000 colleagues with this new way of working, which helps to reduce the time it takes for complaints to be resolved.
• How we’re seeing positive results already – such as an 11% increase in the number of customers who say we treated them fairly.

You can also read the independent audit of complaints resolution processes from 2014.