The Energy Live Consultancy Award (TELCA) has been very beneficial in helping improve customer service in the industry.
That’s the view of Mervyn Bowden, Managing Director at Intuitive Energy Solutions and Chair of Judges for TELCA, a prestigious annual award ceremony which celebrates the best of the best in the sector.
He said: “I think the TELCAs have inspired a lot of work in the customer service area so there’s almost manic focus on customer service stats and satisfaction rates which has got to be beneficial to the whole industry. So I think the TELCAs have been very, very useful in that space ahead of [Ofgem’s] regulation in the form of codes of conduct.”
Louise Kingham, CEO of Energy Institute agreed customer service performance has improved.
She said: “I guess the best people to judge how the industry is being perceived are essentially the customers and they seem to be feeling better about the job the industry is doing so that’s really positive.”
Angela Knight, former Energy UK CEO and Chair of the Office of Tax Simplification added: “The very fact that you’ve now got something that’s measurable is indicative of a better view of the industry generally and certainly some of the examples that came through on the submissions from customers do rather support that as well.”
The judges were overwhelmed with the standard of applications this year and record breaking number of entries.
David Porter, Former CEO of Energy UK said: “The standards going up like that means that it’s awfully difficult at times to make a distinction between one submission and another. It’s getting tougher to be a judge at TELCA.”
Tim Rotheray, Director of the Association for Decentralised Energy added: “A lot of people say ‘we really care about our staff’ and I’m sure they do but everyone says it but this year we saw some people saying ‘we care about our staff and all of our staff have had training this year’ or ‘we really care about customer service and we’ve implemented this’ and that’s actually really, really helpful. So people are actually evidencing why it is they’re different.”
The main event will take place at the Honourable Artillery Company grounds in London on 30th June.
