ScottishPower faces sales ban over poor customer service

Household money

Updated on 02 December 2014 | 10 Comments

Ofgem has ordered the energy provider to improve or face suspension of sales to new customers.

ScottishPower has been given three months to improve its customer service, or else Ofgem will suspend the energy firm's sales operation.

The energy supplier has had a terrible 11 months since it installed a new billing system almost a year ago, resulting in a vast number of customer complaints.

Ofgem has outlined three areas where improvements must be made:

  • Significantly improve the average speed of answering customer calls to two minutes by the end of January. It’ll publish weekly progress reports detailing call waiting times starting at the end of this month
  • Slash the number of overdue bills. Today more than 75,000 are late. This needs to fall to 30,000 by the end of December
  • Completely remove the backlog for acting on Ombudsman decisions for individual complaints by the end of November.

ScottishPower will detail its progress towards these targets on its site each month. If it misses any of them, proactive sales will be suspended.

To tackle these improvements, the energy supplier has hired 250 more customer service staff on top of the 450 employed earlier in the year.

Ofgem has also launched a separate investigation into how ScottishPower treats its customers.

Are you with ScottishPower? How has its service been in the past? Let us know in the comments section below.

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