According to a new report out today, more than five million people have switched their energy supplier in the last year.
All I can say is – are you surprised? I’m not, these companies seem to be milking us more and more each year. British Gas made record profits in the last twelve months and recently prices went up again by 15%.
OK, I know that wholesale gas prices do rise and then the companies have to put their costs up to cover this. However, I don’t understand why when they go down (which they will do again in June/July mark my words) they keep the prices up for a few more months just to make sure. They do this and then announce record profits – hmmm.
Apparently, Scottish and Southern is now the largest supplier and I can tell you why that is. It only put its prices up yesterday compared with some of the other companies which did it pretty much straight away.
Personally, I use Scottish Power which has great customer service and a good customer portal which means I can see how much I owe it at any one time. I used to use NPower but I spent my afternoons waiting on the phone (average call time more than 30 mins). I ditched NPower and I am now very happy with my new supplier as I can speak to them when I want and guess what they are actually friendly on the phone.
All I think many of us Brit’s want is good old fashioned customer service. If it means I have to pay a little bit more – then that’s fine with me.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
