British Gas Business has been fined £9.5 million by industry regulator Ofgem after it “let customers down” when it botched its migration to a new IT billing system.
It is the utility’s second penalty in as many months, having been fined £4.5 million in December for failures in its business ‘advanced meter’ deployment schedule.
The gas and electricity supplier implemented a new IT system in March 2014 but Ofgem said tens of thousands of its business customers suffered from both delated and inaccurate bills in the aftermath, while a further 6,000 new customers experienced registration delays.
Ofgem also said that the resulting delays – which British Gas Business said increased significantly – were handled poorly or not on time.
The supplier came forward voluntarily nine months later, and the resulting Ofgem investigation concluded that British Gas had not treated businesses fairly, nor moved to protect customers from issues that arose through the migration.
Dermot Nolan, chief executive at Ofgem, said British Gas Business didn’t act quickly enough to resolve the situation.
“Many existing businesses customers were left without accurate bills, causing significant concern. New customers were delayed from switching to the supplier, potentially costing them money by leaving them on a more expensive deal with another supplier.
“Ofgem welcomes suppliers investing in new systems and recognises that this can be challenging. However the £9.5 million payment also sends a strong reminder to all energy companies that they must treat consumers fairly at all times, including while new systems are put in place,” he added.
Ofgem did however note that British Gas Business has since made improvements to its customer service processes, including the hire of 350 agents to handle increased call volumes and a backlog of customer complaints.
The £9.5 million fine will be used to both compensate micro-business customers affected by the migration issues and support the Money Advice Trust, a charity established to help energy consumers in need of advice.
In response, British Gas Business MD Gab Barbaro said the “major undertaking” didn’t go “as smoothly” as the supplier would have liked.
““We’ve worked hard to put this right since and Ofgem has acknowledged this today. We’ve restored a very good quality of customer service, and more and more of our customers are going online to use the new billing system. I’d like to apologise to our business customers for any inconvenience caused when we were implementing the system,”Barbaro added.