Genesis caves, brings back door-knocking

Genesis Energy stopped door-todoor selling in 2014, with much media fanfare. New Zealand’s largest energy retailer said its research suggested Kiwis didn’t like salespeople turning up on their doorstep — so Genesis wouldn’t.

“We’ve found four out of five don’t like door-knocking, find it intrusive,” the company said at the time. “So we’ve made the decision to take the leadership and stop.”

Almost five years later, and with no media fanfare, the company has caved to market forces and started door-to-door selling again.

James Magill, the firm’s executive general manager of customer and innovation, says door-to-door is a good “channel” for getting a message across to customers.

“We’ve found that in a highly competitive market we need to be out there speaking with customers face-to-face and showing them our new energy management tools, introduced over the past 12 months.”

One big problem for Genesis is that although customers and consumer organisations applauded its “do not knock” stance, its competitors didn’t follow its lead.

And as the market share of the major players — Genesis, Contact Energy, Mercury NZ, Meridian Energy and Trustpower — continues to be shaved by smaller new entrants, Genesis decided to go back to door-knocking.

Genesis has seen its electricity market share fall from almost 27 per cent in 2013 to 23.7 per cent last year, according to Electricity Authority figures. Number two electricity retailer Contact has fallen from 22.3 per cent to 19.3 per cent over the same period, Mercury from 19 per cent to 18 per cent. Trustpower’s share has gone up from 11 per cent to 12.7 per cent, and Meridian’s has remained at 14 per cent.

Magill says the way the company does its door-knocking now is “very different” to how it was done in the past, “and we have processes in place to monitor it carefully”.

But that’s not the experience of one customer, who didn’t want to be identified, but we’ll call Jane. Her house had been targeted by Genesis salespeople twice in two weeks, despite having called the power company and asked to be left alone.

“Today another young man from Genesis knocked on the door. When I said we were on a ‘do not visit’ list with Genesis he said no such thing existed. He said Genesis outsources to MPD Marketing, and the system has no ability (that he knew of) to inform cold callers of people that had asked not to be visited.”

Consumer NZ chief executive Sue Chetwin recalls some Genesis anti-knocking social media campaigns in 2014, and the power company teamed up with Consumer NZ to send out “Do Not Knock” stickers for people to put on their doors.

“It’s incredibly disappointing,” Chetwin says. “We worked with them, we thought they were genuine. They’ve had a change of management and completely backtracked. It’s a disgrace.”