Amid the cost-of-living crisis, customers who are struggling to pay their bills have been forced to switch to prepayment meters. Approximately 600,000 people were put onto the pay-as-you-go method last year, with 160,000 more expected by the end of the winter, impacting hundreds of thousands of customers, according to Citizens Advice.
Jo Allen, Utilities Customer Experience Expert at Pegasystems and previously a customer experience manager at British Gas, shares her thoughts on this:
“The Citizens Advice research shows that pre-payment meters are leading to serious problems.
No energy provider wants to cause hardship, but pre-payment meters are a recommendation that is about ensuring the energy provider is getting paid, rather than understanding the problem and helping the customer to avoid energy poverty.
Fitting a prepay meter is just kicking the can down the road, when a provider should be taking a longer view which would pay off in the long term in terms of revenue. Energy suppliers need to get down to the root cause of the problem for the customer. In order to do this, they should understand each individual customer and take a more proactive approach to spot signs of financial distress much earlier can avoid the imposition of pre-payment meters. This does require a transformation in the way the provider engages with customers to understand and be more responsive to their personal needs and requirements.
Currently, some providers may regard delivering personalised help at a huge scale as too difficult and expensive because of how their customer management systems are unable to adapt to change and cannot work with detailed data.
But new centralised decisioning solutions that apply real-time AI to analyse customer data and spot any behavioural changes can be transformative. They enable companies to be able to recommend the best offers, actions and services for each individual based on their needs at that time.”
