2009 Customer Feedback Report

At ScottishPower we always try to put our customers first. We value your feedback and recognise your right to make a complaint, compliment or suggestion about our services. It’s this feedback that gives us opportunities to learn and improve the way we do business with you.

In the 12 months to September 2009, you communicated with us over 7 million times, by telephone, letter and email. While the vast majority of these contacts were normal day-to-day business transactions, there were some occasions (4.6%) where we felt the need to log your contact as a complaint. To us, a complaint is "when a customer tells us that they are unhappy with our service".

Customers often say that they aren’t specifically asking us to log a complaint, but we feel that by doing so, we can use it as an opportunity to consider whether this was a one-off incident or resulted from an underlying problem in our systems and processes which could affect other customers.

Over the last year, we recorded over 300,000 contacts as complaints, providing us a wealth of information to review and where necessary improve our services. For that we thank you.

So how do we learn from your feedback? Each piece of feedback is carefully reviewed to establish what we can learn and if we can improve our services. We have a well-established governance regime where customer feedback is included on the agenda for all management meetings. We also monitor trends and performance in our handling of customer feedback by producing regular reports for operational and senior managers.

What action can we take to put things right when they go wrong? If we make a mistake, we’ll apologise to you and try to take practical action to put things right. We may well ask you to suggest what you’d like us to do, so we can try to meet your expectations. We’ll always try to return you to the position you would have been in but for our mistake. And we always try to ensure that the same mistake doesn’t happen again.

In trying to put things right, we find that many customers' issues can be resolved quickly. In fact, over 65% of the contacts we logged as complaints were resolved by the end of the first working day after they were received. For the others, which we needed to investigate in a bit more detail, a full resolution/ explanation to the customer wasn’t possible within the first couple of days. This means that 113,031 complaints weren’t resolved by the end of the first working day after they were received.

Further information on how we handle complaints is provided in our Complaints Handling Procedure. If you’d like a hard copy of this, please call 0845 2700 700, Minicom 0800 027 4900 (Monday to Friday 8am – 7pm, Saturday 8.30am – 1pm) or email contactus@scottishpower.co.uk. Alternatively, you can write to us at:
ScottishPower Customer Services, Cathcart Business Park, Spean Street, Glasgow, G44 4BE

Finally, our complaints handling process has been designed to meet all the requirements of the 2008 Complaint Handling Standards introduced by our Regulator Ofgem (The Office for Gas & Electricity Markets). These Complaint Handling Regulations can be found on the following government website:

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2008/pdf/uksi_20081898_en.pdf