East London based Maxen Power, which supplies more than 10,000 non-domestic customers has paid £1.65million for customer service failures.
Ofgem found that Maxen Power breached its licence conditions by not having robust systems in place to protect its customers.
This allowed third-party reps to sign up new customers without their consent by claiming to work for other suppliers.
Ofgem also found evidence it put unreasonable requirements on customers to evidence a change of tenancy by asking for a large number of documents.
The time taken to pull these documents together risked tenants being locked into a more expensive ‘deemed rate’ tariff which can lead to a build-up of debt and financial difficulty.
Maxen Power also failed to put an adequate complaint handling process in place and so had an unusually high number of complaints for an organisation of its size.
The majority of complaints related to poor communication with customers, difficulty changing tenancy and mis-selling tariffs
Dominic Alexander, deputy director of enforcement at Ofgem said: “Maxen Power fell significantly short of our standards. And it’s concerning to hear that some business customers faced debt and financial difficulty because of their supplier’s failure to provide an easy, transparent and reliable service.”
Maxen Power paid £1.65million to the Energy Industry Voluntary Redress Fund which provides money to charities that deliver energy-related projects and support energy consumers in vulnerable situations.
