This marks the beginning of a new era of empowering customers to deal with their own complaints.

Under the new arrangements Consumer Direct offers frontline advice to residential customers enabling them to handle their own complaints through to a satisfactory resolution. Consumer Focus, on the other hand, gets more involved and deal with complaints on behalf of both residential and small business customers in certain circumstances, such as:

• Customers who are considered vulnerable.
• Customers who have been or are under threat of disconnection.
• Complaints involving complex issues.
• Where the customer is unable to resolve it themselves.

The new bodies are not a direct replacement for energywatch. They are there to offer customers support and advice and Ofgem is looking to energy companies to take more ownership and responsibility in dealing with customer complaints.

The task set by the new consumer representation arrangements was always going to be complex, challenging and require sustained action to ensure that customer service delivery is of the highest standard. The demands of the changes are substantial to our business, behaviourally, culturally and technologically.

Research commissioned by Ofgem into customers' satisfaction with suppliers’ complaints handling, carried out in December 2008, found low levels of customer satisfaction across all suppliers. Out of the big six suppliers, E.ON rated joint highest for satisfaction (with a satisfaction score of 29%).

We had already identified the areas highlighted by Ofgem in their independent audit as weaknesses, along with other areas of development to improve our performance, and although improvements have already been implemented, we will continue through our programme of work to ensure our performance increases.
We are fully committed to giving our customers the best experience we possibly can and expect this will be evident in future reviews by Ofgem.

Our customers expect bills that are accurate and timely. Since last April we’ve been working with third party agents and suppliers to review the end-to-end industry processes. This has enabled us and our industry partners to identify and address some of the root causes of billing issues and put in place controls to identify data issues at the earliest opportunity. We’ve made substantial progress to date in reducing backlogs and improving our performance and this work will continue.

We have a tool available called E-Data that enables our customers to view their consumption online and extract the information for their own needs. Demand in the last quarter of 2008 has shown we get between 300 and 400 individual requests by customers or energy brokers per month.

Steps are being put in place to:

• encourage customers to use E-data
• ensure there’s a single process focal point for residual demand.

This will remove the duplicate emails and allow time to provide this service

When part of our network is experiencing problems, our customers tell us that the quality of the information we provide to them is key. We make sure our information is available in a variety of formats to meet the diverse preferences of our customers. Our distribution business is the only Distribution Network Operator (DNO) to offer live network information on our website, where customers can also access detailed information about faults and planned outages, including estimated restoration times, start times for the outage, and exactly how many customers, including the streets and postcodes, that may be affected.

Building on this, we’ve now developed the service to offer our customers a free live localised network information service via text message. This allows customers to check if their supply is interrupted. We’ll then text back with all the relevant information we have. So regardless of where they are, our customers are able to quickly access information about faults in their area.

A significant increase in the number of foreign farmers working in our region has brought with it the need for us to translate our safety leaflets into the most widely used languages in our areas. Through our partnership with the East Midlands Language Agency, in addition to the wide range of foreign language leaflets already available, we’ve produced our farming safety literature in languages including Russian, Romanian, Polish, Turkish and Latvian.

We also work closely with Asian communities and we’ve distributed a range of information leaflets to 30 Asian community centres across our region. We’ve also advertised in a prominent Asian newspaper, to ensure customers are aware of who to contact in the event of a power cut.

We work closely with the Royal National Institute for Blind (RNIB) and the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID) to produce a training package for all frontline customer-facing colleagues, exploring the issues faced by blind, hard of hearing and visually impaired customers, as well as offering communication advice.We’ve also produced audio and plain text versions of all of our customer service information leaflets and we ensure all of our new literature is assessed by an independent panel of visually impaired customers to ensure the information is clear and accessible.

In January 2008 we became the first electricity distribution company to be awarded the RNID’s nationally recognised "Louder than Words" charter mark of best practice. This demonstrates our commitment to providing the best levels of service to all our deaf and hard of hearing customers and colleagues. The RNID has acknowledged that we have met and exceeded their 10 quality standards of customer service and have provisions in place to meet the needs of deaf and hard of hearing customers and colleagues.

Our field colleagues have also undergone a flagship visual awareness training course to learn how best they can help visually impaired customers, whilst they are working in the highway. We’ve worked with OSISS Training Services, who had previously worked with the Guide Dog Association, to create a four-hour training package specifically tailored to our field colleagues. This involves staff negotiating a street works site, whilst using equipment to simulate visual impairment, including a blindfold and white cane. The site is altered for the staff to experience the potential dangers of unsafe sites, and therefore appreciate the importance of correct and safe sites and to give an insight into the world of a visually impaired person. Staff are also given practical ways to assist visually impaired people as well as advice and tips for communicating effectively.

Following a trial in the Birmingham area, we’ve invested in a two-year training package which will involve every operative and supervisor who work in the highway on our behalf, which includes:

• All internal colleagues involved in carrying out capital works, repairs and new connections
• All External Service Providers currently working on our behalf and associated E.ON Businesses

We are currently the only distribution business to be running this training with OSISS, and in total 3,500 colleagues will have attended the street works refresher training by the end of 2009 with training being delivered locally at the work locations of the colleagues involved to minimise our carbon footprint and to encourage the interest of other supporting colleagues.

The training course focuses on two of the three main objectives of the New Roads and Street Works Act, which obliges us to use our best endeavours to execute our street works (a) in the interests of safety, and (b) to minimise the inconvenience to persons using the street (having regard, in particular, to the needs of disabled people).

We have chosen to concentrate on the particular challenges that our roadworks can bring for visually impaired pedestrians.

This initiative was shortlisted for an Industry Safety Award in December 2008 (The NJUG Safety Award).