Dialogue: When keeping it simple makes everyone happy

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Read this: On Energy is committed to getting back to basics. This means getting your bill right the first time and billing you on time.

And, when you ask a question, we'll answer it efficiently and in a way that creates a positive experience for you. We are determined to deliver on our promises.

This comes from a circular letter from TransAlta, dated February 22, to consumers advising them that the company had changed its name to On Energy from February 23.

Now I would have thought the basics for an energy company would have been to get you your gas and/or electricity efficiently and give you excellent service. But to On Energy, the bill comes first. And the inference from this statement is that the bills haven't been correct or on time.

Then there's that positive experience. Say I write and ask: I think the bill is too high so I'm not going to pay it. What are you going to do about this? I want a positive experience as a reply.

Among the promises the letter says On Energy is determined to deliver on is that consumers won't be bothered by any inconveniences as a result of the name change. How much would they bet on that?

My sensibilities are so often wounded by this sort of commercial communication I usually throw them away at a glance, masochism not being one of my pleasures.

But this one was sent to me by a Devonport correspondent who makes the point: One sentence on my next power bill would have been sufficient to inform me that the company had changed its name again. One can only speculate how much this separate mail-out cost the company and, indirectly, me.

And he doesn't mention all the other costs associated with a name change.

Well, getting it into one sentence might have been tough, but let's try three to carry the essence of what the A4 sheet says:

TransAlta has been acquired by Natural Gas Corporation and the new entity will be called On Energy from February 23. For consumers, billing periods, all present payment arrangements and the service centre 0800 numbers will remain the same. If you have any questions concerning the name change, call 0800 ON ENERGY (6636-3749) from 7 am to 9 pm, Monday through Friday.

That would have reassured consumers rapidly and comfortingly and cheaply.

My Devonport correspondent may or may not be an educated man, but his note to me rings with a brusque common sense. The writer of the TransAlta letter may possibly have a PhD in drivel writing, but the real point about this sort of circular is that company communications people almost always think banal self-praise scores commercial points when they attempt to communicate with clients and the public.

It doesn't.

What it does achieve is expensive ignorance and confusion as those clients give up wading through rubbish and don't get the message.

On the subject of language, I thought I might return to Palgrave's The Golden Treasury. Two weeks ago, I noted the 250th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.

And among my correspondence came a letter from Peggy Finlay telling me that she and her husband, former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General the late Dr Martyn Finlay, went to Stoke Poge's Parish Church (scene of the elegy) in 1971 because of his affection for the poem.

Dr Finlay said in his valedictory speech in Parliament that he had repeatedly turned to the deeply moving and profoundly understanding elegy for guidance.

Well, here's another significant poetry anniversary - it was 180 years last month since John Keats died. So I went back to Palgrave and reread the first serious poem I ever learned by heart, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Since then I've come to love the way Keats could make poetry and music cross-dress, so beautiful are the rhythms and cadences of stories such as La Belle Dame sans Merci and Ode to Autumn.

Yes, they are stories. It seems unbelievable that anyone, let alone an apothecary's apprentice, could have written this work before the age of 25, which is how old he was when he died in Rome of tuberculosis.

So back to Palgrave, guys.



The Government, through the Census form, asked how I felt about people seeing, after 2101, the information it legally insisted I gave it last Tuesday night. A Government pretending to be able to control accessibility to private information in public archives for a century is so absurd, it set me falling about. Why not 1000 years?