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SSE and E.ON to axe cold calling

Joanna Faith
Written By:
Posted:
16/08/2013
Updated:
16/08/2013

Two of the UK’s ‘big six’ energy companies have today announced plans to axe all cold calling to potential customers.

In future, Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) and E.ON will only contact customers they already have a relationship with or potential customers who have previously agreed to a call.

In April, SSE was fined £10.5m by the regulator Ofgem for mis-selling gas and electricity, while last November E.ON was fined £1.7m for overcharging almost 100,000 customers on their energy bills.

SSE’s group managing director, retail, Will Morris said: “Nobody likes receiving a sales call out of the blue and so we are stopping it.

“It doesn’t matter that other energy companies still do it, or other industries for that matter, cold calling is not something that a company like SSE – committed to providing an excellent customer experience – should be doing any longer.”

Anthony Ainsworth, sales and marketing director of E.ON UK, said: “This is the right thing to do. Over the last few months we’ve been working hard to make sure we truly understood how people feel about getting so called ‘cold calls’ at home and although we were still putting things in place to make this happen behind the scenes, it is best that we speed things up and confirm today that we’ve stopped these telephone calls.”

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Research carried out by consumer organisation Which? found that eight out of ten people had received an unsolicited call in the last month. Eight per cent had received 50 or more. A quarter of the people said they felt intimidated by cold calls.

Richard Lloyd, Which? executive director said: “Our research shows the energy industry is one of the main culprits for cold calling, so it’s good to see big suppliers commit to ending unsolicited sales calls, and we hope other energy companies will now also stop this nuisance.”