npower meets late bill target and sees progress on reducing complaints

Since December, we have been working hard to improve our customer service performance. As part of this process, we agreed with Ofgem that we would reduce the number of late bills to 100,000 by the end of August. We also committed to improve significantly our complaints performance and report our progress for the rest of the year on www.npower.com/customer

Last month, we reduced our late bills to around 62,000 customers, (96,700 accounts) – slightly better than our final target of 100,000 accounts, and around the level our business was running at before our system issues began.

The total number of complaints outstanding at the end of the month was reduced to 23,000, down from 24,500 at the end of July. We will continue to publish our progress in this area on our website for the rest of the year.

Commenting on yesterday’s figures, Roger Hattam, npower’s Domestic Retail Director, said:

“I’m pleased that we have met our commitment made in June to reach our billing performance target.  We’re now billing over 98% of customers on time. However, the journey doesn’t stop here as we’re working hard to make even more improvements.

“For example, we’ve reduced the number of complaints outstanding with  the Ombudsman by over 70% since the end of May, but this is an area where we will be doing more. This is our own commitment to our customers.”

Table detailing August’s targets

Complaint category                                   May                June               July                Aug

Complaints received                                    132,821          120,016          121,662          99,799

Of these, unresolved after 24 hours            15,683                        10,788                        13,660                        9,917

Total complaints outstanding                       41,156                        30,071                        24,558                        23,065

Ombudsman complaints outstanding         4,283              2,896              1,587              1,223

Ombudsman remedies over 28 days         33                    0                      0                      0

Late bills

Target                                                             N/A                  350K A/C       200K A/C       100K   A/C

Actual                                                                                     343K A/C       193K A/C       96,700 A/C

(231K cust)    (129K cust)       (62K cust)

A spokesperson for Ofgem said:

“Ofgem is encouraged to see that npower has met our targets aimed at reducing late bills and we note their progress on reducing complaint numbers. But this is only a first step to turning round their customer service and billing performance. We will monitor their progress and continue our investigation into the reasons why npower’s problems occurred.”