Dear Mr Phillips-Davies
I’m not sure if it is usual practice to reply directly to the CEO with regard to a text communication, but I thought I would anyway. I have a sneaking feeling that I now understand why your overall personal remuneration dropped from £2.71 million in 2018 to £1.65 million the following year, and I would like to help. After all, we don’t want to think of our utility leaders having to sneak onto Lidl to do their groceries on a Friday evening, do we?
Actually, it is in regard to seven texts, rather than one, from Scottish and Southern Energy that I write, but let’s start with this morning’s. ‘Based on your overall power cut experience, how would you rate the service you received from us between 1-10 (10 being excellent).’
During the twenty hours of darkness, cold, rotting deep freeze food and swearing outside that we went through yesterday, I have to confess that I hadn’t really thought of it in terms of ‘my overall power cut experience’, but I see your point. I can quite see that, these days, everything is an experience. I mean, I wonder if Priti Patel’s staff get emails of a Friday asking: ‘Based on your overall experience of my management style this week, please rate me between 1-10 (10 being only mildly bullying, objectionable and dictatorial)’.
I suppose the grade I give you has to start with a conversation in my paddock with two of your staff three weeks ago in which they politely asked, and I agreed, if they could site a small generator in the field to provide power for the village whilst they worked on replacing the poles. Since then, my field has been a cross between the aftermath of the Battle of Passchendaele and and overflow car park on an industrial estate. I’ll say one thing, though, which is that your team know how to park up their diggers neatly at the end of a long day.
Let’s pass by the security staff playing drag racing games around my bee hives at all hours day and night, and the fuel replenishment people staring up at the upstairs window whilst we prepare for bed. In fact, let’s pass up five years hard labour trying to turn the field in to a wild flower meadow. One can get too precious about nature, don’t you think?
Rather sweetly, you sent us a text exactly one minute before the ‘power cut experience’ one which said: ‘Following your contact with us yesterday regarding your power cut, we’d like to ask you a single question about your experience with us. The question will follow this message.’ Which it did. And it made me wonder whether just the one message would have done the trick. And by the way, I don’t think it was MY power cut so much as yours. I mean, I don’t technically own that power until I have used it, which obviously I didn’t get round to.
And then there were the five messages yesterday, each one beginning ‘We’ve received an update from our teams on site….’ Which then went on to delay reconnection for a further 2 hours….four times. And the rather curious phone conversation I had with your ‘customer service’ department (I use the term advisedly) assuring me that SSE’s engineering team were on site as I spoke, despite my assurances that they weren’t, as I was leaning against the generator at the time, and couldn’t see or hear anyone. I suppose they might have been very small, and very quiet, rather like your Complaints Department.
Then finally the triumphal message that informed us that our power had ‘been restored’, in case our eyes blinking into the artificial light had failed to work it out for themselves. ‘Thank you for your patience’, it said, so I suspect that they hadn’t been in Park Cottage during the day.
I can only conclude, because your mission statement includes the introduction: ‘We are driven by our purpose: to provide energy needed today while building a better world of energy for tomorrow’ that yesterday was a day that you were concentrating on tomorrow.
As for the grade, I’m not actually going to give you one. Instead, I will offer you something far more useful, a quotation from a book on Scottish crofting that I re-read from time to time:
‘Tell them they are giants and they will believe you, because they have not been to the museum where the bones are kept’
My bank details follow.
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