Wednesday 30 January 2013

EDF – Customer Services To Complaints


We’ve been customers of EDF for many years and have always found their customer services advisers generally helpful at sorting out queries with bills etc. Until the latest little problem …

A letter was sent increasing our direct debit payments quite sharply, despite our current balance being easily cleared within a couple of months on our existing payments. Never mind, we thought, we’ll speak to them.

Ha! That’s when the fun (not) began. Three attempts were made over three separate days to contact EDF. Each time we waited patiently whilst being subjected to the most irritating music, before having to abort the exercise due to other more pressing matters.

One day, we finally got lucky … sort off. We were actually connected to a customer adviser, it’s just a shame she didn’t seem to have a clue what she was doing. We were (wrongly) told that EDF did not supply us with both gas and electricity – must have been a phantom energy company all this time then! The subject of payment was lost in the confusion, so we requested a chat with a superviser, who was supposed to ring back within half an hour.

An hour and a half later we received a phone call, from a rather irritated individual, who said the original adviser had got it all wrong (you don’t say), but by the way if we didn’t agree to the increased payments, we would be removed from the direct debit system! (I will be featuring direct debit payments in a later blog). Anyway, what she really wanted to do was to ring us back on Monday, for unspecified reasons, but probably because this was 1.30 on Saturday and she was due to knock off at 2.00 and needed to rinse her coffee cup or something before she went.

In frustration, we rattled off an email to the EDF ‘Complaints Resolution Manager’, who actually proved to live up to the title. In less than 24 hours of sending the email, we received a call, which actually quite painlessly resolved the situation, allowing us to keep our existing payments without any fuss.

Yes, of course we would have preferred to resolve the matter with our first phone call, but it’s nice to know that at least EDF’s complaints department is on the ball. Perhaps a little re-training for some of the customer advisers/supervisers wouldn’t go amiss though, so come on EDF let’s have your whole customer services team working efficiently!

Let me know your experience of customer advisers. comments@shoppersjoy.co.uk

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