'Which?' Supplier results

Which? magazine recently completed a survey of its readers into energy suppliers. The article below is taken from their website.

Energy company satisfaction survey results

Ovo 77%
Utility Warehouse 77%
Ebico 72%
SSE 56%
Eon 49%
Scottish Power 46%
British Gas 45%
First Utility 43%
EDF 40%
Npower 34%

Sample sizes: Utility Warehouse (185), Ovo (93), Ebico (46), SSE (1,516), Eon (1,619), Scottish Power (1,117), British Gas (1,860), First Utility (173), EDF (888), Npower (644), Total sample size was 8214.

Good news for small energy suppliers

The results tell a familiar story, with the 'big six' energy companies scoring badly again. The top spot is shared by a newcomer, Ovo Energy, and energy and telecoms provider Utility Warehouse. The winners were followed closely by tiny ethical supplier, Ebico, which is the UK's only not-for-profit energy supplier.

Good Energy - which topped the leader board in last year's survey - couldn't feature in this year's results as we didn't get enough responses.

One impressed customer described Ovo Energy's attitude to customers 'a welcome change', and others praised the supplier for paying 3% interest on credit balances.

Bad news for the giants

At the other end of the scale, it’s business as usual for the big six energy suppliers, with Npower – which has recently improved the design of its bills – propping up the table with a satisfaction score of 34%.

British Gas, EDF, Eon and Scottish Power also get poor satisfaction scores from Which? members. Scottish and Southern Energy retains in its position as the best of the 'Big six', but still only got a customer score of 56%.

Accuracy of bills: how the energy supplier is rated for the accuracy of its bills.
Understanding bills: ease of understanding energy bills from the supplier.
Customer service: how well customers feel they are treated overall.
Encouraging efficiency: the supplier's efforts to encourage customers' energy efficiency.
Online support: speed of correspondence, ease of website navigation, politeness of correspondence and whether needs are understood.
Phone support: time taken to get through, automated service, politeness of call centre staff and whether needs are understood.
Queries: ability to resolve issues and speed of answering telephone and online queries.
Value for money: how the supplier is rated for value for money.
Customer score: combines overall satisfaction and likelihood of recommendation to a friend.

In October 2010 we sent 27,085 Which? online panel members a survey about their energy supplier. We received 8,421 responses – 4,010 for gas and 4,410 for electricity. While many respondents would have been dual fuel customers, we selected gas or electricity at random and asked each member to think about either gas or electricity in their responses.
(c) Which?

The suppliers and ratings shown in the list are based upon completed surveys and are not in any way related to prices of energy and tariffs.

An independent price check of all of the suppliers shown above can be found at http://www.getmecheapbills.com/

It can be seen that in many cases (with the exception of OVO) the smaller companies do well in the survey but are amongst the most expensive suppliers in the country. The reletively small sample sizes and the fact that the customers of the smaller suppliers are more likely to be based upon recommendation and also have a vested interest in the survey, are possible explanations for this.