BRITISH GAS AND ITS CUSTOMERS – HOW NOT TO RUN RELATIONSHIPS

It’s little wonder that Ofgem, the energy industry regulator is launching a formal investigation into Britain’s energy supply market. News of the inquiry comes hard on the heels of Centrica, the owners of the increasingly infamous British Gas, reporting record annual profits of £1.9billion just a month after the nation’s biggest utility hiked its prices by 15% - representing a five fold increase in profits for British Gas to £571million. The company may have the backing of the CBI’s apologist director general Richard Lambert ( well they would wouldn’t they) but the reality is that an increasing number of their customers are living in ‘fuel poverty’ and it’s little wonder that 70 MPs have signed an early day motion claiming that the utility market is not competitive enough and is dominated by six suppliers - the biggest of which is of course good old British Gas.

For its part British Gas has warned that its 16 million customers would continue to face higher bills for energy for the foreseeable future. In most marketplaces customers would just turn their backs on the company that treated them in this shoddy manner and go elsewhere – but as the MPs have cleverly spotted the other utility providers have also hiked their prices – and it’s quite disturbing, not to say disconcertingly suspicious, to see how similar some of their tariffs are.

So British Gas customers are between a rock and a hard place - and why should the company really care about the way it treats its customers? Anybody tuning into BBC television this week would have seen the story about the guy who had his home broken into by British Gas while he was on holiday so they could fit a new meter - and he wasn’t even a British Gas customer! They then went on to tell the Watchdog programme that he had been paid £200 compensation for this outrage and had cashed the cheque - when in fact the cheque was still in his possession and un-cashed because in his view it was not enough and he was asking for a lot more. You couldn’t make it up really.

This company’s apparent disdain for its customer base is something I believe will come home to haunt it in the long run. It will be interesting to see what Ofgem comes up with in their inquiry into the utility sector - one that consistently comes at or near the bottom of the league tables when it comes to how happy customers are.

If I was running a competitor to British Gas I would do two very simple things - make my pricing competitive, and treat my customers with a bit of respect.