Dear Customer,
The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has impacted all of us, and we wanted you to know what we are doing to ensure our continued support for all of our customers over the next few weeks.
All of us have a role to play to help with the national effort to slow the spread of the virus, and our focus is on the well-being both of our employees and our customers, as well as supporting the wider community.
We understand that our customers will have concerns about the regularity of their energy supply over this period. Please rest assured our engineers and customer support staff will be doing all they can to ensure we maintain the highest level of service. We are working behind the scenes to keep you (and our teams) safe and protected.
Our working hours for General Enquiries has now changed as we’re taking steps to keep our hard-working people in our call centres safe. The new hours will be Monday to Friday, 8 am to 6 pm.
We have postponed non-essential maintenance work and other activities not directly associated with emergency work, providing appropriate protective clothing where our staff need to attend on-site. Whether it be site-wide or individual energy outages, we have processes in place to react and resolved faults quickly.
Due to the social distancing guidelines, our metering operatives will not be able to obtain meter readings from your premises. Please can you email your meter readings to SUSCutomerservice@sse.com. If you don’t provide readings we will estimate your next bill based on your historical consumption. As soon as it is safe to do so, we will resume meter reading activities.
To help you, we have provided below the answers for some frequently asked questions. If you have particular concerns not answered here, then please call our Customer Contact Centre on 0345 078 3268 or email us at SUSCutomerservice@sse.com.
Kind regards,
Rochelle Dickson, Head of Customer Service – Enterprise Utilities
Frequently Asked Questions:
1. How should I get in contact with you at this time?
We want to keep our phones free for our most vulnerable customers, therefore, where possible we are asking customers to send us an email to SUSCutomerservice@sse.com. This way our teams can work on getting back to you when the phone lines are quieter, we have teams working 24/7/365. The benefit here is that you are not left hanging on the line unnecessarily and you can get on with your day. We’ll typically get back to you within the same day.
2. How do we pay our bills if we can’t get out and about?
You can call us on 0345 078 3268 to pay your bills over the telephone phone. We are also bringing forward the go-live of our new customer online portal to early April 2020, where you will be able to pay your bills and perform many other actions online.
3. What do we do if we suffer financially and struggle to pay bills in the coming period?
We encourage any customer in this situation to contact SSE as a matter of urgency so that we can discuss how we can help you. We may be able to make changes to your payment plan, or in extreme cases place a temporary hold on your account until your situation changes. At this difficult time is our wish that our customers do not experience additional financial or other stress relating to their energy supply.
4. Will you respond to fault calls as normal?
Yes, where it is safe for both our staff and customers to do so. If we need to visit your property and anyone there has contracted COVID-19, has suspected symptoms, or is self-isolating after direct contact with another who has the virus, please could you let us know as soon as possible so we can make suitable arrangements.
5. What will you do if any of your engineers contract COVID-19?
We will do the right thing by contacting all customers and staff that the employee has been in contact with in the 14 days prior to the confirmed infection.
6. What about your call centre staff? Is their sufficient cover for them?
Yes, our centre staff have now been issued with equipment to work from home and we should be able to ensure that shift workers and those staff who handle customer call enquiries can continue to fulfil their roles as usual. Also, you will soon be able to use our customer self-serve online portal for many activities.
30th March 2020