Charities looking to improve access to energy providers customer support

A south coast community energy cooperative has urged energy providers to give frontline advice teams access to dedicated phone lines, to support vulnerable people worrying about their bills.

Energise Sussex Coast were one of many advice organisations to take part in a roundtable with Ofgem chair Mark McAllister and non-executive director Warren Buckley in late 2023.

The roundtable explored the biggest challenges consumers and frontline advisors were facing across the country – with clear themes coming to the forefront.

As well as wanting direct access to energy providers’ customer service teams, Kate Meakin, Director at Energise Sussex Coast, believes there’s a need for providers to invest in training for their customer service teams.

Kate said:

“The roundtable was really good. All of the advisors spoke about the same consistent themes – mainly about the amount of time it takes through to get to energy providers and the poor customer service that people receive.
There was lots of talk about people not being able to get through, people being hung up on and generally advisors being rude.
It’s expensive for us to do this. Most of the time we’re wanting to set people up on payment plans, which should take about an hour. But if we can’t get through or calls drop, we could be on the phone for two or three hours, over multiple days.
There’s such variety in the level of service in providers’ customer service teams. We definitely need more advisors trained in dealing with vulnerable clients.
We have lots of clients who have anxiety and depression, so even the thought of calling up providers can be very stressful before you actually get to navigating the call itself and knowing what to say. When they get through and people are rude, it makes the situation even worse.
We really need a direct line to energy providers, like the Citizens Advice have.”

Ofgem say new Consumer Standards rules have since come into effect, helping to ensure that all domestic energy customers receive good customer service from their supplier and make it easier for people to contact them.

Kate added:

“I think they really listened to what we all had to say, so it’ll be interesting to see whether things change.
However, we’re all seeing an increase in the number of people with energy debts, but the height of those energy debts is really concerning. For people to have energy debts of over £1,000 or even up to £5,000 is now really normal. The good thing is that we can help, but people are getting stuck because they can’t afford to heat their homes.”

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