News
Water audit experts report water deregulation in the UK and switching water supplier is causing a substantial negative effect on water bill processing.
Water audit experts H20 Building Services are reporting we are one month into water deregulation in England allowing switching water supplier and already the cracks are starting to show.
They said customers will see benefits in water deregulation and switching water supplier such as
- Lower water bills.
- Improving customer service.
- Tailored services such as consolidated water bills reducing bill processing costs.
We are actually experiencing
- Lower water bills but higher charges due to incorrect billing
- Water bills returned to the water retail company 5 times with errors and they are still not correct.
- Demand letters for bills that were never sent out in the first place and the water company knew of this error but have not sent the bills out
- No customer service improvements, now poor customer services such as no replies to queries on water bills via email, poor response via telephone, waiting on average 30 minutes to get through to customer services only to be told please email your query we are too busy to take calls.
- No resolutions on water bill errors.
- Consolidated water bills are increasing billing process costs due to the errors on mass.
- Most of our clients not received bills for Scottish sites for 2 months, now into month 3 and still no bills and little prospect of getting any, although the water retailer received our complaint a month ago still no apparent progress.
Today we have received bills from NWG Business and all bills are incorrect, 30 sites for a national company, it is extremely worrying to think that potentially thousands of water bills have been sent out to customers that are incorrect.
The water bill validation team within H20 have said bill auditing and processing times and costs have literally doubled in the last 6 weeks, but even when the bills have been rejected the water companies are simply not rectifying the water bills in a timely manner.
We suspect this is happening right across the UK and that there are undeclared serious flaws in billing systems and data record errors, this coupled with staff who by their own admission do not seem to know what is going on.
If this situation continues H20 will be writing to suppliers putting them on notice there will be a fee per billing account for each bill rejected due to billing errors.
Many companies will have incorrect bills, some may not realise if they have not employed water experts to validate the bills.
