Why households switch, or stay with, their energy supplier

What is shaping electric power

Power utilities serve millions of households and businesses, and are judged on reliability, billing accuracy and how well they communicate during outages. Smart meters are changing the relationship.

• Smart meters are changing billing and payment behaviour
• Outage communication strongly affects satisfaction
• Digital payments are replacing counter payments

An energy retailer, working in United Kingdom. Client identity is withheld to protect confidentiality.

Organisation

An energy retailer

Sector

Electric power

Team engaged

Market Research

Services

Consumer panel, Quantitative research, Data analytics & dashboards

Following a period of high energy prices and supplier failures, the retailer wanted to understand what customers valued, how much they trusted suppliers and what would make them switch when the market reopened to competition.

• Answer the core question: why households switch, or stay with, their energy supplier.
• Understand the views, needs and behaviour of bill payers.
• Produce results that can be compared across groups and locations.
• Give the client evidence it can act on within 6 weeks.

The work focused on 3,000 bill payers.

• bill payers3,000

Audiences we typically reach in electric power

Residential consumersCommercial and industrial consumersSmart-meter usersField and call-centre staffRegulators

Coverage: United Kingdom. Market: United Kingdom.

• United Kingdom

A structured quantitative design, so results could be compared across groups, locations and time.

1. 1Brief
2. 2Online survey
3. 3Churn driver analysis
4. 4Insight

We surveyed bill payers about satisfaction, trust, price sensitivity, customer service and switching intentions, and combined the results with the retailer’s churn data to identify the strongest drivers of leaving. The sample was weighted to reflect tariff types, payment methods and regions.

Consumer panelQuantitative researchData analytics & dashboards

bill payers

3,000

• Online respondents were drawn from verified panel members who matched the screening criteria, with quotas on key profile attributes.

• The online survey was mobile-friendly and offered in respondents' languages.

• Digital fingerprinting and duplicate checks
• Attention, speed and straight-lining checks
• Review of open-ended answers
• Logic and range checks on the final data
• Work carried out under our ISO 20252 quality procedures

• Cross-tabulation by key groups and locations
• Significance testing on the differences that mattered
• Driver analysis to find what most influences the outcome
• Interactive dashboard for ongoing tracking

• Billing accuracy and easy contact mattered more than small price differences for most customers.

Trust and service kept customers more reliably than discounts.

• Build on the core insight: trust and service kept customers more reliably than discounts.
• Focus effort where the evidence was strongest: billing accuracy and easy contact mattered more than small price differences for most customers.
• Re-measure after the changes to confirm the effect.

• The retailer invested in billing quality and digital self-service, and focused retention offers on the small group most likely to switch for price.
• The retailer repeated the survey six months later to measure the effect of its service improvements on trust and retention.

What changed in the business as a result of the work. Impact is described qualitatively.

• Insight report and management presentation
• Cleaned data file and data tables
• Interactive dashboard

• Repeat the measure after changes are in place to track progress.
• A natural follow-on question: how should outages be communicated?