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Treating Customers
Fairly

Treating customers fairly at EDF Energy

At EDF Energy we’re committed to treating our customers fairly. We know that trust in our sector needs to be improved and that growing trust will take time. We have an ambition to become the best and most trusted energy supplier. And we’ll only succeed if we consistently live up to our commitment to deliver fair value and better service, and by making energy easier for our customers.

Our industry regulator, Ofgem, has now made the commitment to fairness a requirement for all energy suppliers. We welcome the introduction of these Standards of Conduct because we believe they’ll improve the experience for all customers and ensure consistency of treatment. This Treating Customers Fairly statement provides you with more information about these standards and the main actions we’re taking to deliver fair outcomes for our EDF Energy customers.

Ofgem has published a set of guidelines explaining what they expect.

How we're working to ensure we treat you fairly

We want to treat every customer fairly. 

To make energy easier for our customers, we provide many ways for customers to contact us and manage their accounts. Our customers can email us, or call us to speak to an advisor here in the UK, and they can access and manage their account online with MyAccount whenever they need to. Our residential and small business customers can also use the EDF Energy app to manage their account on the go and get support through Whatsapp or SMS.

We’ve introduced a Trust Test to make sure we meet the Standards of Conduct. It means that when we create new policies, processes, products or communications, we ask ourselves ‘is this the right thing to do for our customers?’. Then we ask five more questions:

  • Is this a fair thing to do?
  • Are we being professional?
  • Are we offering products, services and advice appropriate for our customers’ needs?
  • Are we being transparent and communicating clearly?
  • Are we being honest? This includes admitting mistakes and acting quickly to put things right

We hold a Standards of Conduct Advisory Panel with respected third parties such as Which?, National Energy Action (NEA) and Citizens Advice which helps inform the actions we should take to treat customers fairly and develop our products and services to best meet their needs. These meetings are attended by our Customers Business Managing Director, Director of Sales and Marketing and Director of Customer Operations.

High standards for every customer

We’ve put various measures in place for our sales teams to help them give customers the same high level of service whenever, and however, they get in touch with us. This includes better training and monitoring, as well as a customer satisfaction survey which goes to everyone after they have completed the process of joining us. We also give our staff incentives to focus on quality and compliance – not just based on how many calls they can make, or the number of tariffs they can sell.

Tackling complaints head on

In 2015 we set up a complaints improvement programme to make sure we handle complaints more efficiently, and reduce incidents where we think a complaint’s resolved, but the customer doesn’t. Our complaint management is focused on positive customer outcomes, closing the ‘resolution gap’ and our Senior Management take accountability for identifying, addressing and preventing future complaints. We’re pleased to say that this and other efforts we’ve made have reduced the number of complaints we get. From January 2016 to September 2016 we had 24% less complaints than January 2015 to September 2015. Citizens Advice has also ranked us second for complaints handling amongst the major suppliers (and fourth out of 22 suppliers overall) in its Q3 2016 Residential Complaints League Table. Demanding the best from everyone we work with Today’s energy market isn’t just about suppliers. Other types of business, like price comparison websites, are also interacting directly with customers. We expect anyone who works for us to have the same high standards as our own. So we’ve put extra quality checks in place on sales that go through third parties to make sure that’s the case. We will only work with selected third parties we believe are fair and adhere to Ofgem’s Standards of Conduct.

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