Forget the past and look to the future
Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2025 5:38 am
Forget the past and look to the future
There is no way around it: until a few years ago, the utility sector and therefore the companies that supplied water, electricity, gas, telephones were perceived by each of us as distant, unreachable, impersonal. Bills were delivered to the mailbox, reading them caused severe headaches. And in the event of specific problems, you had to dial a toll-free number, wait and then cross your fingers. Or embark on convoluted and intricate complaint procedures. In short, the individual customer had little, very little say in the matter: he found himself crushed in a mechanism bigger than himself.
This scenario has been swept away forever. What's more: the paradigm has list of angola consumer email been overturned, and now everything revolves around the customer who is accustomed to the one-click engagement mechanisms of Amazon or Uber (just to give two examples) and who, therefore, in a few steps wants to have answers and a solution for his problems: in short, to feel that his voice does not fall into the void.
Not grasping this epochal change, or not accepting it, can have unpleasant consequences. This is what happened to Scottish Power, a company with more than 3 million customers, which in 2016 was forced by Ofgem (the British regulator of electricity and gas markets) to pay a fine of 18 million pounds for its customer service deficiencies. An article published in “The Guardian” specifies that the company had accumulated over a million complaints from its users between June 2013 and December 2015. A huge number, the result of a media buzz that developed – to the point of reaching frightening proportions – especially on social networks. This was already in 2016, let's try to imagine what would happen today.
There is no way around it: until a few years ago, the utility sector and therefore the companies that supplied water, electricity, gas, telephones were perceived by each of us as distant, unreachable, impersonal. Bills were delivered to the mailbox, reading them caused severe headaches. And in the event of specific problems, you had to dial a toll-free number, wait and then cross your fingers. Or embark on convoluted and intricate complaint procedures. In short, the individual customer had little, very little say in the matter: he found himself crushed in a mechanism bigger than himself.
This scenario has been swept away forever. What's more: the paradigm has list of angola consumer email been overturned, and now everything revolves around the customer who is accustomed to the one-click engagement mechanisms of Amazon or Uber (just to give two examples) and who, therefore, in a few steps wants to have answers and a solution for his problems: in short, to feel that his voice does not fall into the void.
Not grasping this epochal change, or not accepting it, can have unpleasant consequences. This is what happened to Scottish Power, a company with more than 3 million customers, which in 2016 was forced by Ofgem (the British regulator of electricity and gas markets) to pay a fine of 18 million pounds for its customer service deficiencies. An article published in “The Guardian” specifies that the company had accumulated over a million complaints from its users between June 2013 and December 2015. A huge number, the result of a media buzz that developed – to the point of reaching frightening proportions – especially on social networks. This was already in 2016, let's try to imagine what would happen today.