UK's energy supplier British Gas Business is to pay £9.5 million in redress “following failings in its registrations, complaints handling and billing processes for business customers,” UK regulator Ofgem said.
When British Gas implemented a new IT billing system in March 2014 “tens of thousands of its business customers were left with delayed and inaccurate bills”, with over 6,000 new customers experiencing delays registering with the supplier, Ofgem explained.
As a consequence, the number of complaints the supplier received significantly increased, and “many were handled poorly or not on time.”
Therefore, British Gas has agreed to pay £9.5 million in redress. This includes direct payments to affected micro-business customers, and payments to the charity the Money Advice Trust (which provides the Business Debtline service) to help energy consumers in need, the energy regulator explained.
The issues were reported by British Gas Business to Ofgem “voluntarily” in December 2014.
Ofgem investigated and found that the supplier “had failed to treat these business customers fairly” as “it didn’t do enough to protect affected customers from issues that arose from the implementation of its new IT billing system”. This included making sure that its customer service processes were adequate, and that it had allocated enough staff to deal with complaints.
After initial problems emerged, British Gas Business compensated some affected customers, acted to reduce levels of delayed bills and contacted customers to explain problems with the billing system. The supplier allowed some customers to switch despite being in debt, if that debt was related to its failure to produce a bill, the regulator acknowledged.
“British Gas Business has since improved its service for affected business customers” and “it has taken action to put right its customer service processes, hiring up to 350 specialist agents to help handle increased call volumes and a backlog of open complaints” Ofgem underlined.
“ It has also significantly improved its performance on billing and customer registrations” it added.
“The £9.5 million payment also sends a strong reminder to all energy companies that they must treat consumers fairly at all times, including while new systems are put in place” commented Ofgem’s CEO Dermot Nolan.
“Many existing businesses customers were left without accurate bills, causing significant concern” he said, adding “new customers were delayed from switching to the supplier, potentially costing them money by leaving them on a more expensive deal with another supplier."
British Gas said it apologised “to our business customers for any inconvenience caused when we were implementing the system” and added “the issues are now resolved.”