Tariff billing company ARMS Ltd has been criticised for its “short-sightedness” in taking customers for granted and not bothering to analyse its own customer trends.
Queuing times were halved
A National Audit Office report found that the firm has yet to implement key performance indicators established in 2009 and noted that ARMS’s approach to data analysis seemed “indicative of a lack of the right approach to customer orientation”.
The NAO report follows up on a similar analysis of ARMS Ltd last year and also looks into claims that smart electricity meters could be tampered with.
The auditors found that the meters comfortably passed tampering tests and that ARMS was outperforming its own debt-collection targets.
The company had also reduced customer waiting times, answered more phone calls and significantly reduced the number of locked readings.
But the NAO also found that the company still had no specialised unit to deal with meter fraud, voiced concern at the decision to postpone the switch to smart metering by a full 12 months and wondered why the company was still issuing an “exorbitantly high” number of incorrect bills.
One passage in the report reveals auditors’ incredulity at ARMS management’s resistance to analysing the company’s own data trends.
Auditors rap ARMS
“It is inconceivable how a service provision entity, with a customer base in the range of 300,000... takes such a stand,” the NAO noted.
ARMS’s approach was all the more galling when one considered the “significant investment” that had been made in making the necessary analytical tools available, the auditors added.
A company spokesperson denied that ARMS was reluctant to analyse trends and said that it had invested in new billing software that went beyond implementing sampling measures.
He said that the 2009 key performance indicators mentioned by the NAO had simply been “revised” to keep abreast of ongoing developments.
Almost 90 per cent of households now received five or more bills a year, the spokesperson noted. He argued that queuing times had been halved, waiting time decreased by 84 per cent since November 2010 and ARMS’s call answering response rate reached 96 per cent last August.
The NAO report also noted with concern that key agreements signed years ago between ARMS, Enemalta and the Water Services Corporation were still missing “the sole components that would enable the benchmarking of ARMS Ltd performance”.
Incorrect bills continue to be a concern, with the relative number of bill reversals – seven per cent – remaining unchanged since the NAO first flagged the issue in 2011 and management seemingly “resigned” to the status quo.
The company spokesperson said that bill reversals were inevitable in some instances. Such reversals, he explained, were not erroneously calculated but simply amendments to reflect changes in the billed households.
The company’s success in reducing utilities debtor bills by 61 days had boosted cash flow by €75 million and meant €1 million savings in interest payments, the spokesperson said.
The national switch to a smart metering system, originally pencilled in for January 2013, is now expected to happen by the end of that year.
ARMS plans on switching over the entire grid to a smart metering system overnight – something the NAO has queried – and argued that, if things went pear-shaped, they could rely on manual meter readings until difficulties were ironed out.
The NAO report also found that ARMS’s call centre assistants had managed to answer 2,000 more calls between May 2011 and May 2012, although there were 900 more abandoned calls in May 2012 than 12 months earlier.