The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) today released its annual assessment of its Customer Service Incentive Scheme (CSIS) for AusNet Services, CitiPower, Powercor and United Energy.
The AER has approved a total of $5.98 million for these Victorian distribution network service providers (DNSPs) due to their efforts to improve their customer service throughout the 2022-23 regulatory year. The breakdown of these incentives for each DNSP are:
- AusNet Services $296,225
- CitiPower $1,677,949
- Powercor $1,643,886, and
- United Energy $2,364,501.
Distributors will obtain these incentives as a result of implementation of new programs, IT solutions, and internal practices to improve their customer communications and complaints management. The cost will be recovered by DNSPs through Victorian consumer energy bills as part of their annual pricing proposals for 2024-25 regulatory year. There is no material impact on consumer bills as result of the CSIS outcomes for this year.
As part of our assessment, we have also decided to suspend the complaints performance parameter for AusNet Services because the data used to measure this performance indicator was incorrectly collected by the distributor. AusNet Services' outcomes were therefore calculated on its remaining three parameters (communication on planned outages; communication on unplanned outages; and customer service for new connections). AusNet Services has also elected to forego the recovery of the $185,877 for good customer service performance for unplanned outages during 2022-23.
Background
The CSIS was introduced in July 2020 and is designed to encourage electricity distributors to improve their engagement with their customers. This is achieved by distributors undertaking consultation with their customers to identify services their customers want to improve, and then set targets and incentives to improve those services based on customers’ preferences. The distributors may be financially penalised or rewarded depending on how they perform against their customer service targets.