Submitted by Mike Grenville on Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:55

Consumers in the UK will soon be able to text their gas and electricity meter reading(s) from their mobile phone.

Incentivated has signed a contract with Dataserve UK, the former Scottish Power and Manweb metering, registrations and settlements businesses, to build and host a meter-reading service. Readings are validated and inserted directly into the existing billing engine in order to generate accurate bills instead of estimated ones.

In these times of high and rising energy prices it is in the consumer’s interest to make sure their bill is correct, especially since the law requires the supplier to take an actual reading only every two years and estimate in between. Estimates can lead to over-payment or alternatively the accumulation of a potential bad debt. After submitting their reading(s), the consumer receives confirmation by text message or details of where a mistake has been made. The service offers an alternative to the traditional methods of post or IVR when Dataserve’s meter-reading operative is unable to gain access to the property.

Dataserve ran a trial of the service during late 2005 in the North West and Scotland and found a willingness of customers to use the mobile medium as well as a high accuracy rate of readings submitted. The potential for substantial cost reduction in each reading collected due to the automated nature of the service is an added benefit for Dataserve and the service helps the company respond to its regulatory requirements.

Simon Evans, Business Transformation ‘Blackbelt’ at Dataserve said, “The results of the trial in the North West and Scotland enabled our board to take the step of being the first utility company to roll out text message meter-reading on a permanent basis. ”

Jonathan Bass, Managing Director at Incentivated, said, “This is an obvious application but it takes a forward-thinking client like Dataserve to actually put it into practice. We ran numerous trials with the client, interfacing the consumer with various parts of the organisation and found a natural affinity for the medium throughout. Customer service functions like this should be geared to the medium of choice for the consumer. Offering a range of choices such as text messaging alongside IVR, online and postal options, has to be the right choice for simple interactivity such as this. The mobile medium is the preferred channel for more and more people and it happens to be a method that should drastically reduce Dataserve’s cost of meter reading acquisition as well.”

Time For More

This type of simple customer service has been talked about for some time but has so far only slowly been adpoted by utility services. Energy suppliers were told by regulator Ofgem in 2005 that they have a year to improve the way they bill their domestic customers – or face regulatory action following news that 61.5% of complains to consumer champion energywatch were on billing issues.

This type of service has huge potential benefits for both the business and consumers alike and we hope that other utility companies will take note.