Simon Hendery: Smarten up your act, Contact

Photo / Brett Phibbs

There are numerous good reasons for upgrading our electricity infrastructure to "smart grid" technologies and smart metering.

Energy is expensive and often scarce. The more we can monitor its use - both at a provider and consumer level - the more effectively we can use it.

Businesses and families save money. The planet gets saved, one kilowatt at a time.

Last month I experienced the lunacy of the old way - a dumb meter attached to a dumb grid going terribly wrong.

My home electricity provider phoned with a bizarre announcement. They had recently discovered that the power meter monitoring my apartment hadn't been recording accurately since January.

They had now replaced it, taken a reading of my consumption over the ensuing seven days and would send me a bill based on multiplying that week's usage by the number of weeks they said the meter had been out of action.

They concluded I owed them several hundred dollars.

They would kindly knock off a bit of a discount since I probably used less electricity over summer when the problem began, and they apologised for the inconvenience.

I live in a large apartment complex and, after asking around, discovered others in the block had received similar calls.

It's hard to know where to begin when critiquing the failings of a business that finds itself dealing with customers in this fashion.

Contact is in the business of providing electricity to customers and billing them for what they use.

Given that, how it can take the organisation several months to realise a meter is not working baffles me.

Aside from that rather fundamental operational failing, the flow-on effect is to create a customer relations nightmare. Consumers presented with a guestimate bill because the company's technology doesn't work are going to be either grumpy, refuse to pay, or probably both.

Solving these grumpy customers' issues is a huge, unnecessary drain on staff resources.

On one level I'm not surprised by this fiasco. Contact has a particular knack for enraging its customers. Remember the thousands who deserted it when the company's directors insisted on raising their fees as power prices rose?

To its credit, however, Contact has begun making use of smart meters. As well as providing customers with the power to better control their electricity consumption, another advantage of a smart grid is that it reports back almost instantly when a meter fails.

Having that ability is surely the basis for a better business model than the it-broke-a-few-months-ago-so-here's-an-arbitrary-bill approach to customer relations.

I live in hope that Contact gets smart in my part of town sooner rather than later.