Is your energy company’s service any good?

Ignition · 8 October 2013 at 2:07PM

psmith64 wrote: »

Is that your last comment Martin as you can't bring yourself to look at the facts I suggested and report back the truth to people why this company is able to retain it's customers as backed up by the incredibly low churn rate that it was totally transparent with in it's last annual accounts.

You won't find published churn rates with any of the other companies you are comparing in this survey as frankly they would probably be embarrassing to those companies.

And you consider comparing retention rates of gas and electricity companies with those of a company that offers discounts for taking gas, electricity, broadband, land line and mobile, delivering quintuple play, reasonable how exactly?

Why do you think Sky went into broadband and telephony or ntl/Telewest bought Virgin Mobile? Something to do with seeing considerably lower churn the more products customers buy as it raises the bar towards leaving?

Why do you think UW have various enticements to have people become 'gold' members taking 4+ services? Again, retention.

Please give statistics that compare like for like: UW gas and electricity only customers versus the other utility providers.

If you compare the churn on quadruple play Virgin Media to that of a dedicated ISP like Plusnet shockingly the churn is considerably lower on Virgin Media. Same effect here. Simple.

psmith64 · 8 October 2013 at 2:11PM

whitelabel wrote: »

Had you been a member who read this forum you would see that both praise and criticism is given of all companies by the 1000s of membes when it is due, there are specific areas exactly for that and it is encouraged and well used.

I stand by my comments on and do not consider having any weight to throw around beyond my length of time and my unbiased posts which count for nothing beyond what others interpret it to mean.
I have highlighted particular factual statements made in this thread which have not been adequately countered and used careful considered language which was not accusary but makes a comparison to something else unless is direct reference to a particular fact ie something explicitly stated eg length of membership which when pointed to be factually inaccurate gets defensive and denies not stating something as fact when they did .

I'm not hear to cause arguments either and won't necessarily comment on this further as it is plain for all none interested parties to read and make their own judgements easily.

Whitelable -I don't think anyone is here to cause arguments, just to ensure correct and accurate information is given to the general public. As an investor in this company it is important to me for obvious reasons that people do know the facts as mis-leading information could lead to people not becoming customers.

Fact Telecom Plus has a churn rate a little over 1% ( which has been diminishing over many years) as shown in it's last accounts submitted to the city. This backs up what the survey Martin Lewis is currently conducting in suggesting that Telecom Plus has a very satisfied customer base. If this was not the case customer retention would be bad.

I am afraid that what Martin Lewis says at the top of this thread that he intends to put a remark that people should take the 97% good customer service with a pinch of salt takes no notice of the fact out there that this figure is in - fact correct.

To put such a remark will possibly do some of his web site visitors a dis service as it may influence a decision for them to at least take a look for themselves and see why the company is doing so well as backed up by financial information submitted to the City.

psmith64 · 8 October 2013 at 2:21PM

Ignition wrote: »

And you consider comparing retention rates of gas and electricity companies with those of a company that offers discounts for taking gas, electricity, broadband, land line and mobile, delivering quintuple play, reasonable how exactly?

Why do you think Sky went into broadband and telephony or ntl/Telewest bought Virgin Mobile? Something to do with seeing considerably lower churn the more products customers buy as it raises the bar towards leaving?

Why do you think UW have various enticements to have people become 'gold' members taking 4+ services? Again, retention.

Please give statistics that compare like for like: UW gas and electricity only customers versus the other utility providers.

If you compare the churn on quadruple play Virgin Media to that of a dedicated ISP like Plusnet shockingly the churn is considerably lower on Virgin Media. Same effect here. Simple.

Churn rate with Sky is just over 9% - not sure with Virgin as they don't publish.

Proof that quintuple play does not mean you will get lower churn rates. if your service is bad/expensive people will move on regardless of how many services they hold with you.

Ignition · 8 October 2013 at 2:29PM

psmith64 wrote: »

Fact Telecom Plus has a churn rate a little over 1% ( which has been diminishing over many years) as shown in it's last accounts submitted to the city. This backs up what the survey Martin Lewis is currently conducting in suggesting that Telecom Plus has a very satisfied customer base. If this was not the case customer retention would be bad.

Virgin Media's churn rate for customers taking a single service is triple that for customers taking three services, and even more of a multiple for customers taking all four.

Do customers magically become more satisfied when taking additional services or would it not be fairer to say that taking additional services makes customers more likely to stay as it makes moving on more difficult?

At least that's the theory behind ntl: Telewest spending a 10 figure sum on Virgin Mobile and Sky 10 figures buying Easynet and building out a broadband network. More recently even BT spending hundreds of millions on a TV service and content. I would presume they did it for a reason.

Ignition · 8 October 2013 at 2:33PM

psmith64 wrote: »

Churn rate with Sky is just over 9% - not sure with Virgin as they don't publish.

Proof that quintuple play does not mean you will get lower churn rates. if your service is bad/expensive people will move on regardless of how many services they hold with you.

You do know that Sky publish an annual churn rate while UW publish a monthly one, right?

Virgin publish their churn rates as a key metric, you can find them in their investor reports more completely and an overview in the executive summaries. Look more closely you can find statistics for single play versus triple play.

EDIT: You don't seem to have much agreement for that comment.

“The quality of our customer base has continued to improve, with over 55 per cent of new members applying for at least four core services during the year,” chief executive Andrew Lindsay said. “This has resulted in lower churn, lower bad debts and higher average revenue per customer.”

Andrew Lindsay is the chief exec of Telecom Plus.

EDIT2: Sadly I can't post links, so can't cite any of this and the forum kindly told me so by wiping out my post

Anyway were you under the impression that UW churn was reported annually, as your comments about how much lower the churn is seemed to suggest that?

The churn among electricity suppliers in the UK seems around the 15% mark annually based on an Intelligent Utility report. The churn on UW's last reported results was an annual rate of 14.4%, on a customer base that's over 45% quadruple or quintuple play, with contracts on 3 parts of between 12 and 24 months.

This doesn't seem to explain the anomalies in the poll, sorry. I have to say I think Martin has been very reasonable and, if anything, very generous to simply put a disclaimer on the poll.

psmith64 · 8 October 2013 at 2:56PM

Ignition wrote: »

You do know that Sky publish an annual churn rate while UW publish a monthly one, right?

Virgin publish their churn rates as a key metric, you can find them in their investor reports more completely and an overview in the executive summaries. Look more closely you can find statistics for single play versus triple play.

EDIT: You don't seem to have much agreement for that comment.

Andrew Lindsay is the chief exec of Telecom Plus.

Well Ignition - the city certainly like what they have seen from today's company trading update - shares up nearly 10 %

I think people will take more notice of that then anything Martin Lewis may say to detract from what Telecom Plus have been achieving over the past 17 years which is a steady removal of customers from the BIG 6 in respect of energy.

Enough said on the matter now as fact wins the day as ever in these type of debates.

Don't think you will be seeing such a daily hike in British Gas shares now or in the distant future, or 50% increases on a yearly basis - and that say's it all really.

Ignition · 8 October 2013 at 4:25PM

psmith64 wrote: »

Well Ignition - the city certainly like what they have seen from today's company trading update - shares up nearly 10 %

I think people will take more notice of that then anything Martin Lewis may say to detract from what Telecom Plus have been achieving over the past 17 years which is a steady removal of customers from the BIG 6 in respect of energy.

Enough said on the matter now as fact wins the day as ever in these type of debates.

Don't think you will be seeing such a daily hike in British Gas shares now or in the distant future, or 50% increases on a yearly basis - and that say's it all really.

The results are pleasing to the City and kinda expected. Budget everything everywhere are doing well and their share prices / sentiment reflect that. B&M and Poundland are going well, does that reflect quality or their being in the right place at the right time?

Your final paragraph is absurd. British Gas don't have any shares they're part of Centrica, Centrica has a market cap nearly 38 times larger than that of Telecom Plus so to move their shares by 10% requires 38 times the amount of cash.

Clever move, having been shown to be wrong about both the effect of bundling and churn rates as a whole, to try and close down debate.

None of what you've said in any event explains why UW are so hard done by having a small disclaimer put against them in this poll. The number of votes for them are vastly disproportionate to their customer base, the distribution of those votes a huge outlier compared to their peers.

If you're going to claim that the founder of this site has a vendetta against a company you almost certainly have a vested interest in it'd be a good idea if you can give something a bit more concrete than that they've been gaining customers and their share price has gone up based on an interim announcement.

So if you have that something it'd be good to see, please. Otherwise you just come across as someone trying to promote something you make money out of.

Gamblinfool · 8 October 2013 at 9:19PM

Yes I too have just registered as after years of lurking as there's something important I feel the need to say.
I'm quite frankly amazed at the feigned indignancy of Martins comment by the UW posters here and on Twitter when their UW facebook group is full of many distributors encouraging fellow members (currently 4000+) to vote in this survey (I've been sent the screenshots too in case anyone wants to deny this now).
Some even have the audacity to then complain when Martin spots their pretty underhand tactics. They've been instructed now by the leader to desist from commenting but even so I think it displays some quite undesirable character traits from some of their members. The level of defensiveness is typical of many MLM schemes which tend to brainwash their members to only focus on the positives and define anyone who doesn't agree with them as somehow blind to common sense or progress. I wonder if the Which report has similar firewalls in place to detect over-zealous UW members skewing the results?

dougalldeejay · 9 October 2013 at 9:19AM

Surely the percentage should not be 100% but a percentage of all the votes cast?

londonlydia · 9 October 2013 at 2:24PM

To be honest I'd never heard of Utility Warehouse, and now I do the one thing this behaviour has done is encourage me to avoid like the plague. I mean seriously, noone would be as fussed as to join a forum to defend their energy company unless they had some gain out of doing so! I for one are hoping that if the results are published, that this behaviour is highlighted strongly by Martin.