This is a real world B2C customer story of an UK energy supplier with a good reputation – they score 4.6 (out of 5) on Trust Pilot based on 250k reviews – whose process rules were so overbearing regarding a change of supplier that it took nine months and multiple complaints to resolve.
Let’s take a look at what happened to try and understand why, so that your organisation doesn’t fall into the same trap.
Our case study relates to a bungalow that belonged to my mother-in-law, who after a short illness died in the summer of 2024. My wife has managed the estate affairs and contacted the energy provider to inform them of the death and that the property would be vacant for a period of time. Monthly direct debits were reduced, but three months later – with no explanation – went back up again.
In the spring of 2025, having sold our family home of 25 years, we moved into the bungalow. Our plan is to renovate the property – it’s in a large plot in a convenient location – to create something bespoke for our future living needs. We didn’t technically own the property at that stage as we were waiting for probate to be granted, but we needed to notify the energy company that there was a change of circumstances regarding the account holder that they needed to action.
We knew from the outset that we wanted to switch energy provider. My wife had observed the estate account during the vacant property period was c. £900 in credit. You would expect that smart metering would be an indicator of reduced gas & electric consumption, but that was clearly not the case here. The monies were subsequently fully refunded to the estate as part of the account closure procedure but from the initial call when my wife informed the energy company she was now the new account holder, she stated that we were switching to another provider.
You would have thought that would be the end of the story, but no, as some months later a letter arrived addressed to “the occupier” stating that there was an outstanding amount to pay of £27. My wife rang up the contact centre to be told that this charge related to the energy usage for a two day transition period whilst the supplier switching process was being enacted.
And this is where it all starts to get bizarre. My wife agreed to pay the outstanding amount to be told by the call handler that there was no way to pay an account that was ‘owned’ by the occupier – it needed to be an account where she was the named account holder. So the call handler setup a new account and processed a £34 payment (spoiler alert: note this was a different amount). Following the call there was a series of email communication welcoming my wife as a new customer and then being sorry to see her go as the account was immediately closed.
Lessons here to be learned about suppressing irrelevant customer notifications.
Once again, we thought this was the end of the story. But no, as some weeks later “the occupier” received a letter that the £27 account balance was now overdue and the case was being passed to a debt collection agency, along with an additional charge of £20 being added to the balance.
My wife made a second call to the contact centre where there was no resolution provided by the call handler as to why the previous payment hadn’t been applied to the account. This was a very frustrating and unsatisfactory call.
I decided that the only way to make the problem go away was to settle the balance with the debt collection agency, which was something I could do online with the account details matching up the £47 charge apparently due.
I then raised a complaint by email with the energy provider listing the numerous missteps that had taken place. I received a reply which I hadn’t anticipated stating that they were unable to respond to my complaint – stating data protection constraints – as I wasn’t the account holder. My wife had the option to add me as an account holder which we both thought was total nonsense as this was an account that was now closed. Instead, my wife copied and pasted the original complaint details and resent it from her email. Next lesson to be learned – never force the customer to duplicate their actions, when a simple outbound telephone call would have verified the information and gained the relevant consents.
However, now we were ‘inside’ the internal complaint procedure things did get resolved. Firstly a cheque was raised for £20 to repay the debt collection agency fee (as the account should never have been escalated in this way) and then, after a further round of correspondence with my wife, the £34 paid in error was again refunded.
In total – it is now December 2025 – this transitional two day period of energy usage in March has taken 9 months to collect and resolve.
So another lesson to learn regards the materiality associated with high frequency processes, in this case the ‘switching’ process. When you factor in the costs of front line customer service, billing, finance/debt collection and complaint handling teams then the total expenses far outweigh the revenue collected. I would suggest by a factor of greater than 10x. Therefore, the energy provider should have considered writing off the transitional energy revenue below a certain threshold. The organisational time savings would have been a far greater benefit.
And what’s interesting, is that when my wife informed the water company that her mother had died and that the property would be vacant, their customer friendly response was that there would be no further charges until the property was next lived in. The call handler made a specific mention that it was fine for the occasional flushing of the toilet and for the kettle to be filled by visitors – no problem.
And the final lesson to be learned regards the relevance of customer reviews. I started this article by mentioning the “excellent” survey scores the energy provider had achieved. We now know this not to be accurate representation, a fact that it is also not lost on 11,984 members of the public who responded to an annual 2025 Which? customer survey. That survey source rated this specific energy provider among the lowest scoring of 17 energy companies that were reported on.
We now know why.