ScottishPower must now reconnect with customers

NERGY company ScottishPower is starting to look like a firm that is deaf to the woes of customers. It has now had five wake-up calls from Which?, and still it dozes. The latest annual survey of customer satisfaction by the consumer watchdog puts the Glasgow-based firm in the bottom three for the fifth year running. This comesaftertheenergyservices regulator Ofgem warned it in September about its “unacceptable” customer care record.

A persistently poor standard of performance like this might imply systemic dysfunction in any organisation. It suggests inflexibility and inertia, though the latter criticism might appear harsh. ScottishPowerhasrecruited additional customer advisers and hasalsoinstalledanewITsystem, even if many employees in many industries will, from experience, wryly consider this the technological improvement that so often makes everything worse (at least in the short term).

ScottishPower might also point out, though hardly proudly, that it has risen six percentage points in the Which? survey. More germanely, perhaps the problem lies in the scale or culture of the Big Six energy suppliers: all are in the lower half of the table, while the top is dominated by small firms. Arguably, this tells its own story. More worrying for ScottishPower must be the growing awareness among consumers that they can switch suppliers easily now. Not only that but more and more small firms are cropping up. As we reported on Monday, one East Lothian couple gotsofeduptheydecidedtosetup their own energy company.

Though the throne behind ScottishPower lies with the Bilbaobased Iberdrola Group in Spain, it is animportantcompanytoour economy, employing thousands of staff, many of them in the process of moving to prestigious new headquarters in Glasgow. For their sake, we hope the company can get its act together and respond before more customers hit the off switch.