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- First Time Home Buyer - Find a real estate agent that is willing to pay you the next time you are looking for a home.
- Driver's License - You must make sure you change your address with your State's department of motor vehicles (DMV).
- Magazine Address Changes - We have collected some great information on how to change your address to keep getting the magazines you love at your new home.
- Name Change Checklist - If you have recently gotten married, divorced, or changed your name for any other reason, then this list of resources will help you make sure you notify organizations that need to know your new name.
- Nanny - If you are looking to hire a nanny or if you want to learn how to become a nanny, this site offers tons of information directly from professional nannies.
- Babysitting Jobs - We can help families find babysitters in their area that are available and locally certified.
- Nanny Jobs - Find INA certified nannies that have been pre-screened with full background checks at your fingertips.
- Driver's License - You must make sure you change your address with your State's department of motor vehicles (DMV).
- USPS COA Site - You can pay a small fee to change your address here OR you can use our FREE service.
- USPS Options for Receiving Mail - This is an interesting page where you can see what your options are for receiving mail. Did you know you had any?
- Call to Change Your Address - This is an FAQ entry on how to change your address over the telephone.
- USPS State Abbreviations - This is a real quick table for looking up State abbreviations.
Why Electric Companies Don’t Care About Customer Service
In many areas of the country the electricity providers delivering power to homes and businesses are in effect a regulated monopoly. You have really two choices when it comes to power 1) go without or 2) call the one and only power company that can service your home. So, basically since they know they are going to get your business there really is no need for them to focus at all on good customer service. So the knowledge that you are required to be their customer is really the largest reason why they are notorious for bad customer service.
The Internet is a great source of customer complaints regarding electric companies from having your power shut off to countless billing errors, there are tons of great examples. One useful complaint site is my3cents.com where they have hundreds of complaints about electricity companies across the U.S. To be fair this includes both regulated and deregulated electricity providers. One of my favorite (recent) examples of bad customer service follows:
“I checked my apt breakers and realized I was being charged for another apt in my building. I called back a few times until a representative took me seriously and asked me to check my breakers again and said they would send out a person to conduct a meter reading. The meter reading was completed two months later. I called after the reading was done about a month later to check if the switch was made. I was told there was no reason to be concerned, the switch was made and the accounting dept was correcting the billing. Two months after being billed appropriately, I looked at my bill and noticed a high bill again. My apt was billed for the wrong apt a second time.” –ComEd (Chicago, IL area)
A lot of the stories make the electricity company employees just seem completely inept. I’m pretty certain that is not the case. Basically, when dealing with a large electricity company you just have a lot of levels to go through before you actually get to someone that can help you with a problem. If you don’t have any idea which department you need to talk to then it gets worse so be sure to try and figure that out right away.
In addition, to the fact that you WILL be there customer whether you like them or not, their service is also worse because in effect they aren’t incented to stream-line and provide better customer service. The less efficient their processes are, the more they cost and since the government is going to fix the rates based upon cost, the regulated electricity companies have no reason to reduce costs and improve customer service. If they do, they may end up being forced to lower their rates to accommodate for those efficiencies (so you end up just shrinking their budget for the next period).
After having worked in this industry for several years another important factor in their poor customer service is the fact that their IT systems are generally extremely outdated. Some of the electricity providers have true online service order placement (connection and disconnection) systems but most of them are a simple form that ends up just shooting an email for someone in the call center to process like a traditional phone order, but potentially missing some important information. Again, they really aren’t incented to do much about their poor IT systems either for many of the same reasons noted above.
As their information systems indicate, many of these power companies have been around for decades and they find themselves just being slow to adopt new trends as well. They either don’t have the desire to change things because “that’s the way it’s always been” or there is just too much red tape in the way of progress.
Hopefully the poor customer service issues will be addressed as best they can as this industry continues to evolve (especially in deregulated electricity States). Even in places that are regulated, just having competition in other areas of the country should drive some innovations into the industry that will likely creep over into the regulated companies as well. That should eventually help improve customer service over time across the nation. Until then don’t be surprised to find out that your electric company doesn’t care about customer service.
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