Annual Complaints Report

In 2008 new complaint handling regulations were introduced by OFGEM requiring energy providers to publish an annual complaint report.

The Complaint Handling Regulations are published on the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) website.

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2008/pdf/uksi_20081898_en.pdf

We strive to provide the best service we can but inevitably issues do arise.

We value customer feedback and involvement in our business; it's essential to ensure we continue to provide what our customers want.

We have a simple attitude..........

"If we don't know its bust we can't fix it"

.....................so we are happy to get feedback both positive and negative.

While some customers say they don't want to get anyone into trouble, we see their contact as an opportunity to identify whether what they experienced was a genuine one-off or some kind of systemic failure within our procedures.

We also do our best to anticipate and minimise the reasons customers might need to contact us. It's not that we don't want to talk to our customers; indeed we want to engage with them as much as possible in a positive way; we do after all give free shares in the business with an open invite to our AGM.

So we work on a philosophy of 'prevention not cure'.

We regularly carry out what we call 'health checks' on customers' accounts to ensure they don’t build up credit or debit balances and if they do accrue, we try to work with our customers to resolve them. We have introduced a new customer area to better allow our customers to manage their bills and account and we've even introduced Variable Direct Debits for our domestic customers so they only pay for what they consume in the month.

We don't use answer machines, so our customers should never have to deal with a mechanical or recorded voice, it's always a human being; even out of hours!

During the year to October 2009 we handled over 50,000 contacts through the various media of telephone, email and post. The bulk of these were for normal day-to-day business like providing meter readings or changes of tenancy or banking details etc.

We are proud to say that in the last quarter of the year under review we answered incoming phone calls within three rings.

Last year even with the above level of contact volumes, we had only 23 cases we couldn't resolve within 48 hours.

We try to make it as easy as possible for customers to contact us, they can do so in a number of ways and our complaint procedure is published at

http://www.greenenergy.uk.com/MakingAComplaint.aspx