The latest Which? call waiting times have been released: https://infogram.com/energy-companies-customer-service-telephone-waiting-times-table-2020-1h984w9598xd6p3?live. Well done to Together Energy on topping the Survey for 2020, as well as being the only supplier under 1min. Read to to see how others faired, including more underwhelming performances from the Big 6, Octopus showing great consistency, So Energy dropping from 1st to 19th and some detail as to how suppliers’ performance has changed over time.
As ever, it makes for interesting reading, especially with the impact that coronavirus has had on working conditions. The survey was undertaken over September and October and calls were made at different times of the day and week. You would have hoped that by September that suppliers would have been able to put the necessary arrangements in place to operate (for those that cannot get a decent home working experience, workplaces could have been opened to allow those few staff back into the office) without any external impacts from coronavirus, however that has not been the case for a number of suppliers.
Which? Reported in their summary (https://press.which.co.uk/whichpressreleases/which-reveals-energy-firms-keeping-customers-on-hold-for-longer-than-an-episode-of-corrie/) that one of their callers had to wait for over 2 hours to speak to the worst performing supplier, Boost, and British Gas‘s average wait time was longer than an episode of Corrie on catch up… Not great.
10 suppliers have improved on last year, despite the challenges of 2020 and Together Energy are the only supplier underneath a minute from the 3 still trading who were last year. So this shows it can be done. 11 suppliers have wait times over over 10 minutes, with Bulb and SSE only just squeezing in under with 9m56s and 9m55s wait times respectively.
Are Larger Suppliers All Bad?
When Which? first started these surveys, the Big 6 (as was) were underperforming in relation to the new challengers. That remains the case – the top 10 only sees Scottish Power from the legacy suppliers, and only SSE also below 10 mins to answer. Averaging out the times since the scoring has been running, EDF are the “best” performing of the legacy suppliers coming 26th of 42 suppliers (11 of whom have now exited the market). British Gas is 28th, SSE 29th, Scottish Power 33rd, E.ON 35th and npower 37th (and npower run powershop 38th). Although there are plenty of challengers keeping them company in the slower end of the scale, smaller suppliers do generally get to their calls quicker.
However, Ofgem has now ditched the old ‘Big 6’ moniker and so Bulb, Ovo and Octopus are now larger suppliers. So how do they compare?
Well, it’s not good reading for Bulb – starting well when they first appeared in 2017 with answer times under a minute, their performance has deteriorated as they’ve grown, with answer times of nearly 10mins this year (although that is half what they scored in 2019). They average puts them in the middle of the legacy suppliers (30th). Ovo has been fairly consistent over the years, with their worst performance in 2017 of 7m32s only slightly worse than this year’s 6m55s and with an average of 4m32s, they’re placed 15th in the all time list. However, they should be focussing more attention on their prepayment metered customers under their Boost brand, who came last and last by some distance with an average wait time of over 40mins. The best of the biggies is Octopus Energy: 7th in the all time list (or 5th if only counting still active suppliers), with their time this year of 2m04s just off their average of 1m58. So well done Octopus for that consistency over their 4 years in the survey.
Following the pretty poor results in 2013, overall results from the larger suppliers had been generally improving, but the trends show that to be in reverse from 2016, even taking into account Octopus’s hand in bringing down the average, with answer times have started creeping back up. Perhaps renewed focus is required here.
What about the rest?
There were strong debuts in the chart for Green and Igloo Energy who came in 3rd and 4th behind another strong performance from Ampower in 2nd. The only other debutant was Orbit Energy way down in 29th of 31.
Since last year’s survey, we’ve lost Flow & GB Energy (now under Octopus) along with Robin Hood Energy and their white label Ebico (sold to British Gas – what a pain for them going from around 1min to over 23min…!). For some reason PFP Energy didn’t make it into the survey this year. This freed up some space in the top 10, which Utility Warehouse and Scottish Power both took advantage of as they markedly improved from outside the top 20 last year to leap into the top 10 this time.
The worst deterioration has been So Energy – 1st last year with 38s answer times and dropping to 19th this year with a 16m52 average.
Utilita have also made good strides, despite coronavirus to drop their average wait time from 15m44s (33rd) to 4m31s (14th). 2019’s performance was also a great improvement from when they came 2nd last to Spark Energy in 2018.
For those at the bottom, we’ve already spoken about the larger suppliers, So Energy and Orbit. Utility Point and Avro have both been pretty slow to answer historically, never dropping below 10mins. Ecotricity makes up the bottom 10 with a 14m06s average wait. With an average around 1m30s in 2012-2016, they been slowly dropping down the table.
What does this mean for Customer Service scores?
Which? are due to release their customer satisfaction survey in early 2021, so we’ll be able to look at correlations there. I would be surprised to see if there is a direct link. Most consumers would rather wait 5-10 minutes for their call to be answered if that call was dealt with effectively when it was – Together Energy at the top of the charts has been scoring pretty low in satisfaction survey results, and I’d expect So Energy to maintain their high scoring satisfaction ratings despite this (hopefully temporary) slide down the charts.
Historic Performance
Below is a chart of all suppliers with a score in 2020
