hydroone

 

Ontario’s Ombudsman is releasing his findings after an investigation into Hydro One’s billing and customer service practices.

Andre Marin says this was the largest investigation in the history of his office with over 10,500 complaints registered. He says Hydro One’s new billing system, introduced in May, 2013 has been a series of incredible errors affecting over 100,000 customers.

“The transition led to more glitches than expected.  Our investigation found the problem was with Hydro one itself.  Like a lot of huge monopolistic organizations, Hydro One lost sight of its duty to the public.  It was so focused on the technical side of it’s new system, it failed to consider the impact on customers.”

“Hydro One reacted to the complaints in the worst possible way.  It misled it’s overseers and relied on public relations spin adn put customer relation last.”

Marin says many people called his office in a panic fearing they’d have their electricity cut off because of the mistakes the utility was making with bills.  In one case a Timmins man was involved.

“In one case, Hydro One took $10,000 from a bank account from a senior in Timmins, leaving him on the hook for over draft charges. It months before his bill was reduced to $787.  He did not receive an explanation or an apology from Hydro One.”

The Ombudsman gave 65 recommendations to Hydro One, all of which they’ve accepted.  Its CEO, Carm Marcello apologized for the mistakses.

“I agree with the Ombudsman’s recommendations, so much so, we have completed or taken action on 64 out of 65 of them, before the report was even delivered.

Last year I wrote to my 1.3 million Hydro One customers and I told them I was sorry. I wrote to customers who had a bad experience and the vast majority who had not.

We had a problem with our billing system. And we focused on fixing the technical issues but we failed to appreciate how our actions would affect our customers. We let them down and then we didn’t treat them well when they had a problem.

I’m sorry we put our customers through that negative experience and they felt that they had no recourse but to go to the Ombudsman.

Here’s what we have done:

  • We have fixed the billing issues
  • I have put a new team in place, from the most senior executive, to the call centre service provider, to the agents on the phone.
  • We have better training and more customer friendly policies so our front line staff have the power to take better care of our customers
  • We have made customer-centred thinking part of every project”
  • In February of 2014, Hydro One initiated the Customer Service Recovery project, to not only resolve technical problems that resulted from introducing a new billing system, but to also improve service through new customer friendly policies and by changing our customer service culture by:
    • Putting a new customer service team in place and replacing the provider of call centre services.
    • Clearing the backlog of customers who have gone a prolonged period of time without receiving a bill.
    • Decreasing the number of customers who have had prolonged periods of estimated bills.
    • Changing call-centre training, adding customer service centre agents and introducing flexible customer-centric policies for those affecte
      d by billing issues (providing interest-free payment plans, waiving service charges and issuing refunds versus credits).
    • Improving billing and consumption information on the Hydro One website.
    • Hosting Virtual Town Halls with customers to talk about issues that matter to them. Almost 60K customers have participated in these Town Halls.
    • Establishing and implementing new/revised customer service policies, approaches and products.

But Marin says their Customer Recover System has cost about  $88 million or half of the cost of implementing their new billing system.