Service Complaints Procedure

At Energy Ombudsman we work hard to maintain high standards of customer service. If you’re unhappy with our service, we want to hear from you so that we can understand where things went wrong and what we can do to put them right.

We value your feedback, and we want to learn to continuously improve.

This factsheet helps explain our procedure and sets out what you can expect from us if you raise a complaint about our service.

Firstly, we recommend you contact the person who dealt with your dispute or their manager. They’ll try to resolve any problems for you during this initial stage.

If you’ve been unable to resolve things with the member of staff concerned, or their manager, our service complaints procedure is here to help.

Complaints that we can investigate:

Under our complaints procedure we can investigate complaints that involve allegations of poor service or performance, for example where we’ve:

• mistreated you
• failed to follow our processes
• failed to keep you updated on progress; and
• caused unnecessary delays

Complaints that we can’t investigate:

• a disagreement with our investigation of your complaint about a supplier
• the decision made by the case handler
• the failure of your supplier to implement the remedy; and
• complaints that are over six months old.

First stage

The Customer Relations team will review your concerns and send an acknowledgement within 24 working hours explaining which area of our business is best placed to address your concerns.

The leader of that area will assign an individual to respond, ideally within 24 working hours. If the issue is complex, they may need additional time to investigate but they will contact you to agree timescales.

Second Stage

If no resolution can be agreed at the first stage, the customer can escalate their complaint to a leader, senior leader or in some cases to a senior complaint executive in the Customer Relations team to issue a final response. This will depend on the nature of the complaint and the customer’s individual circumstances.

The second stage of the process ends our complaints procedure and if you’re still unhappy, you may refer your complaint to the Independent Assessor. Our final response will explain how to do this.

Independent Assessor

The role of the Independent Assessor is to look at how we’ve handled your complaint.

It’s not the role of the Independent Assessor to:

• look at the decision made about your complaint about a provider
• consider appeals to overturn our investigation decisions
• consider our decision not to accept a complaint for investigation
• consider the weight of evidence; or
• consider the number of financial awards recommended in our investigation decisions.

Complaints to the executive team and Board

Our executive team and members of the Board aren’t part of our complaints procedure, so any complaints addressed to them will be managed in line with our complaints procedure.

Repeat Complaints

We appreciate that consumers may have cause to complain about our service on more than one occasion, particularly where we have a continuing relationship. We’ll always ensure that we consider service complaints fairly and in line with our procedure.

However, there may be occasions when the number or nature of service complaints raised by a particular consumer affects our ability to deal with that complaint, or with the complaints of other people. We may restrict consumers from using the formal complaints procedure in exceptional cases.

Email: customer-relations@trustalliancegroup.org

Post:
Energy Ombudsman
3300 Daresbury Park
Warrington
WA4 4HS