Believing her bills to be incorrect, Ricardo stopped paying them in full. But after calling to complain again and prevent her electricity from being shut off, she was told somebody would investigate and call her back, she said. Was some adjustment made? Did CMP realize a mistake and refund her account? No, she was told. That was the amount she owed.
While call center management conducted an analysis in that recommended the company needed 45 additional customer service representatives, the company only sought approval for Those callers were then disconnected. Despite these issues, across and , 29 customer service staff either retired or voluntarily left the company, the PUC said. The employees that remained seemed to have concerns about whether they had enough resources to do their jobs effectively, according to the results of a third-party survey of CMP customer service employees conducted in the spring of At comparable companies, two-thirds of employees respond affirmatively to that question, according to the administrators of the survey.
The company has since added customer service employees, including 20 after the October windstorm, said Avangrid spokesperson Hartnett.
The new agreement may represent a shift toward more local control, according to Public Advocate Barry Hobbins. CMP critic Rep. As the company shed staff, usually due to retirements, its frontline workers would ask management about hiring replacements, said Ellis, the CMP troubleshooter who retired in January. The answer was always the same. But the approval never seemed to come.
Today, CMP has roughly , customers, a group that makes up less than 2 percent of the Appointed Maine public advocate by former Gov. Davies said at first it seemed as if Iberdrola would take a hands-off approach to its new acquisition.
But that slowly seemed to change. Eighty-five staff accepted voluntary early retirement, and another 36 accepted a severance package from the company in , according to PUC filings. Like nearly all electric utilities, CMP is a monopoly. Part of that regulation involves determining how much profit CMP can make off ratepayers. Too much, and ratepayers are overcharged. The industry standard is somewhere around 10 percent.
As part of this regulation, the PUC has set a cap on how much CMP can pay to affiliates like Avangrid for services the company used to have in-house. The cap was instituted in , not long after CMP first became a subsidiary when it was purchased by Energy East in But the PUC staff rejected this argument, noting that CMP agreed in to work with interested parties to develop a way to evaluate whether the payments to its affiliates were reasonable. But that never happened. At least a few thousand customers continue to have unresolved complaints about their bills nearly a year and a half later.
Billing issues have prompted a PUC investigation as well as a lawsuit accusing the company of fraud. Maine regulators found that inadequate staffing for the project was among many problems with the system rollout.
For utilities, problems stemming from the rollout of billing systems are not unusual. The billing and customer service problems identified by regulators seem to directly mirror the more recent issues at CMP. Maine Focus is a journalism and community engagement initiative at the Bangor Daily News. Write to mainefocus bangordailynews. Skip to content. But as of Dec. The company is now trading on the U.
One industry observer says the merger is part of a larger trend among utilities that want to hedge against rising interest rates and energy market volatility by diversifying their assets.
Richard Sedano is a principal partner at the Regulatory Assistance Project. He says Avangrid has the opportunity to experiment with new energy strategies. One case in point: CMP was an early adopter of so-called smart-grid technologies, which enable real-time metering of individual electricity usage — providing technologies and lessons that can now be applied to the proposed deployment of similar efforts in other states, states where Avangrid is now a big player.
Search Query Show Search. Show Search Search Query. Play Live Radio. Next Up:.
0コメント