SSE Energy Solutions – A joke of a company

Fancy pants graphics on the SSE Energy website but appalling service behind the scenes.

I am writing this whilst waiting for SSE Energy Solutions to respond to my phone call. As I start the blog I after 22 minutes I wonder how many more minutes it will be until they answer!

This is not the first time that I have had marathon phone calls. I have had 3 more in the past two weeks. Let me explain why I have to talk to them in the first place.

I have just taken over a new commercial premises. SSE Energy recognised that I had taken over and eventually after about 2 months sent the right documentation to open the account for gas and electricity. However, they appear to have lost the initial meter readings that I sent in so that they knew the amount of both invoices we would use. This was call one!

So, they sent me invoices for far more power than we could possibly have used. I rang up for an explanation and was partly mollified by SSE explaining that they add unpaid invoices to current invoices which is not at all clear on their invoices, but this still left the situation that I had used nothing like the power that they were suggesting. During the course of this conversation, it transpired that I should not be needing to provide reading at all because the electric meter is a smart meter, and they would work internally to change this. The gas meter is not but we use hardly any gas! This was call two.

BIG interruption. I spoke to an operator after 32 minutes

Then I had to take the meter readings and send them through. This took about two minutes when I could actually speak to some but 27 minutes to wait for the call the be picked up. This was call three

Then on Saturday I received two invoices and two final demands. The amounts on the final demand did not correspond to any of the amounts on the invoices. This it transpires because they were on an invoice for the first month after we moved in, but they had not actually sent me. There had been no attempt 12 days after I sent the meter readings that the invoices needed adjusting. So, the operator has now seen that I have sent the readings and tried to enter them but could not do so.

They are now recording the information in a ‘case file’ so that when I ring again (yes at least another 20+ minute call) everything will be clear to the person I talk to. Eventually we ended the call after one hour and five minutes with us being no further forward than that they will not come in and try and turn our power off.

It also transpires that the information that I was given last time was wrong. Neither the gas nor electric meter are smart ones so that they will need to be manually read until smart meters can be put in. It’s like trying to deal with Kafka on an off day!!

SSE will no doubt suggest that all this could have been done online. In future I will try and use the online route but before you can do this everything needs to be set up properly and that is what has taken so long. I first contacted SSE right at the start of January. On 22 April I still have not got an accurate invoice or a coherent explanation of what the hell is going on. This is call 4 and ended after one hour and ten minutes.

I am afraid that this charlatan approach to customer service is not the only one. My own council, Liverpool, has an appalling record for long waits and often cut-offs before someone gets connected. I spent a long time recently on two enquiries with my bank which I had been unable to resolve by electronic means. This apparently, was because some wrong information had been inputted at the bank end.

You might pick up from this that I am hacked off. You would be absolutely right! It seems to me that the only consideration that major companies have is to cut cost. This is good all round yet not good if the system that they establish just does not work effectively. My guesstimate is that I have spent more than a working day trying to sort this out and that their staff have spent at least half a day so far.

Of course, in the old days the utility companies would send round a meter reader to do the readings and sort out difficulties like this. I would have had to pay an extortionate amount for the meters to be professionally read and would not be able to know in advance when they would be coming to know that someone was there.

So how much has actually been saved by this new methodology? Three tenths of bugger all if you include the cost of my time and phone calls!!

Is it too much to ask that big companies spent a bit less on advertising how good they are and spent a bit more to ensure that the service that they provided was really good and fully responsive?