At the end of the year, the UK's gas and electricity
suppliers will begin to roll out an industry-wide system to handle
customer switching. The move is a bid to stem a £200m a year loss
resulting from inefficient procedures to allow customers to switch
utility suppliers.
Plans for the system, which would be one of the biggest
cross-company IT projects ever attempted in the UK, were agreed in
response to months of criticism about poor customer service.
Regulator Ofgem said that lack of common data formats has led to
hundreds of thousands of consumers being billed incorrectly when
they transferred suppliers, with a loss of up to £200m a year
through inaccuracies.
According to Ofgem, 53,000 transfers - about one third of the
130,000 carried out each week - are not managed using automated
systems and have to be resolved manually by staff.
At a summit meeting last year, organised by independent watchdog
Energywatch, about 40 gas and electricity suppliers agreed to
design an integrated system and to begin implementation in late
2004.
British Gas, which lost £13m last year because of billing delays
and had about 10,000 customers awaiting a year's worth of bills
because of problems transferring data, is spending £300m on a CRM
system to improve control of customer data.
In a joint statement, the company, together with Npower, Scottish
Power and Powergen, announced "their collective com-mitment to
drive improvements in billing accuracy by working to repair and fix
industry processes and improve data quality".
They said, "With many millions of consumers having switched
electricity and gas suppliers since liberalisation of the markets
in the late 1990s, some data inconsistencies in the information
held on some customers have been swapped among all participating
suppliers."
David Bradshaw, an analyst at Ovum, said the industry needed to
tackle some key questions if the initiative was to succeed.
"There is a critical need to decide on a data model," he said.
"Questions that need to be answered range from the highest level,
such as deciding what is meant by a customer, down to the details
of the fields. There needs to be a way of exchanging data, such as
web services or XML.
"The nature of the body to co-ordinate the data transfer will have
to be decided. Will it merely manage the process, set standards and
settle disputes, or will it manage the data hands-on?
"I would say that, given the number of parties involved in the data
transfer, the safest method would be to establish a body to act as
the guardian of the data and force everybody to conform."
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the Treasury.
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