British Gas to pay £9.5m for customer billing failings

24th January 2017 | Residential Energy

Centrica owned British Gas has to pay £9.5m ($11.9m) in compensation to customer who faced billing problems. These came about when the household energy supplier upgraded its system in 2014.

Ofgem the UK energy market regulator has imposed this fine. British Gas is Britain’s largest energy supplier and had shown failings in its registrations, complaints handling and billing processes. This was for business customers and over 6,000 new customers, who experienced delays registering with the supplier.

The £9.5m comprises payments to affected customers and payments to a charity to help energy customers in need.

New Billing System

British Gas said it volunteered the issues to Ofgem after it introduced the new IT billing system. “We invested in a new billing system so we could improve the service we provide to our business customers,” British Gas said in a statement.

“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,” it added.
British Gas said the issues have now been resolved and it has restored a “Very good quality of customer service.”

More information available on the website below

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-centrica-british-gas-regulator-idUKKBN1581AG