THE FAIR TRADING COMMISSION (FTC) wants Barbados’ longstanding electricity and telephone companies to improve their level of service.
While stating that Barbados Light & Power Company Limited (BL&P) “performed well” in key areas of service, and Cable & Wireless (Barbados) Limited (C&W) service performance was “generally satisfactory”, the public utility regulator said they both could do better.
The FTC made the statements in separate standards of service reports for BL&P and C&W. The reports covered the period April 2015 to March 2016.
In its report on BL&P, the FTC said: “Based on the information submitted, it can be concluded that in general, BL&P performed well in terms of both the guaranteed and overall standards of service and as such offered a reasonably good level of service during the April 2015 to March 2016 period.
“However, it must be noted that the relatively weaker areas continue to be the frequency of meter reading and the answering of billing and trouble calls.”
The regulator said: “More attention needs to be paid to improve those areas, as they are strong indicators of the overall level of service provided to the customer”.
It added: “The efficiency with which claims are substantiated and then paid is also in need of some improvement. Measures of reliability were generally satisfactory.
“However, when compared with a few established international jurisdictions, there is room for improvement under [System Average Interruption Frequency Index], which speaks to the number of service interruptions per customer per year. The commission will closely monitor this over the next reporting period.”
In the case of C&W, the FTC said “it was found that C&W’s performance was generally satisfactory”. This was even though the report noted that C&W was “unable to supply information on all six of the overall standards”.
“Information was received for only four standards, with their performance surpassing the acceptable minimum. This bodes well for the overall efficiency of the company at a national level,” the report stated.
“C&W experienced challenges with meeting the expected performance levels for the approval for application of service standard, due to an oversight. The fault repair standard achieved an acceptable level of compliance (84.72 per cent) for the business segment, while residential compliance of 76.38 per cent was adequate but indicates some room for improvement. Customer complaints underperformed and thus requires improvement.”
In terms of customer appointments, the FTC said C&W “performed below expectation for the residential category but was satisfactory for the business segment”, and “the performance of installation of service after approval was also satisfactory”.
“The commission will be addressing all matters of weak areas with C&W, with the expectation of a significant improvement next year, especially as it relates to areas affecting the residential customer,” the report concluded. (SC)
