Citizens Advice is working on a new energy supplier comparison tool that will rank energy suppliers according to a set of individual metrics as well as an overall performance rating.
The five proposed metrics covered by the tool are the number of complaints (weighted at 30% of the overall score), customer satisfaction with ease of contacting supplier (weighted 25%), satisfaction with ease of understanding bills (weighted 25%), average length of time taken to complete a switch for a customer (weighted 10%) and whether the supplier is a switch guarantee member and/or billing code member (weighted 10%). Once the tool is established, Citizens Advice may consider adding other metrics, such as energy efficiency, fulfillment of social obligations and customer satisfaction with smart meters.
Citizens Advice plan to issue an information request to suppliers to obtain average switching time data. The data for the rest of the metrics will come from existing complaints data collected by Citizens Advice, representative data from market research and the Energy UK website.
Citizens Advice has a statutory duty under the Utilities Act 2000 to publish information about the energy market, including complaints data. It currently publishes complaints data for 20 domestic energy suppliers, collected from the Citizens Advice Consumer Service, the Extra Help Unit and Ombudsman Services for Energy, in a quarterly league table on the Citizens Advice website.
Responses to the consultation should be submitted by email to [email protected] before the deadline of 5pm on 9 September 2016.
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