Most of us have – at some point in our lives – dreaded opening the gas and/or electricity bills as they fluttered through the post-box in old-fashioned letters (or L-mail).
Nowadays, monthly average payments and a whole range of new-technology customer-satisfying ‘billing processes’ have taken away that so-last century fear.
Not least of these ‘improvements’ is the ‘smart meter’.
But many SSE customers were seriously shocked when their (not so) smart meters started e-billing them for £000s of power they had not consumed in a major Perth-based IT glitch, with, for example, one display showing almost £20,000 for a single day.
Smart meters let the customer know how much electricity or gas they are consuming each day – and how much it’s costing them – in real time. (Mostly….)
SSE later apologised and said no customers would be charged “the extra amounts resulting from errors”.
- Errors over energy bills and shoddy customer services account for around two-thirds of all consumer complaints. Time to bring back the good-old fashioned meter man..
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