British Gas Business has agreed to pay £9.5 million in compensation to customers, and to the Money Advice Trust (which provides the Business Debtline service)
- Payment arises after British Gas Business self-reported to Ofgem some issues following the implementation of a new customer billing system.
- British Gas Business will contact directly those microbusiness customers that have been identified by Ofgem as being affected by the issues.
- BGB has spent £40 million on the new system, which combined more than 100 old systems into one.
- Implementation was extremely complex, but the problems have now been resolved and billing is working well.
British Gas Business has commented following the conclusion of Ofgem’s investigation, which was launched after the supplier self-reported to the regulator some issues arising from a transformation of its customer account systems.
The issues are now resolved, and we have seen a 30-point improvement in customer satisfaction, as measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS). In addition, complaints fell by almost a third in 2016 compared to the year before. Upon completion of the Ofgem investigation, Gab Barbaro, Managing Director of British Gas Business, said:
"We invested in a new billing system so we could improve the service we provide to our business customers. At the time, this was a major undertaking - merging nearly 100 different systems into one. It didn’t go as smoothly as we would have liked so we reported this to Ofgem as a priority.
“We’ve worked hard to put this right since and Ofgem has acknowledged this today. We’ve restored a very good quality of customer service, and more and more of our customers are going online to use the new billing system. I'd like to apologise to our business customers for any inconvenience caused when we were implementing the system.”