Still waiting...

March 13, 2009:

Still waiting for someone from Enmax to call us back to provide us with an explanation. In the interim, we had received a comment from our blog by an anonymous person:

"Stop whining and pay your bill, I work in the customer service industry and people like you are the bane of our existence, no matter what we do, you always have another excuse to whine, sometimes problems happen, and we are the ones who are first to apologize, your account number and billing schedule changing really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, pay your bill and shut up. "

So, we will take a moment here to respond to this comment:

Firstly, if you had read the blogs carefully, you would notice that we would pay our bills if we could receive them. That is the original problem - we didn't get our bills and when we had contacted Enmax about this, they had no idea why nor did they do anything to help us. Where is the customer service in this? Understanding that problems do arise in any industry but in a customer oriented industry, wouldn't it be wise that the company advise the customer before it escalates instead of just saying "I don't know" and do nothing?

Secondly, we are not whining but in fact, stating the issue (had you actually read the blog). We are also in the customer service industry and to have a CSR: pass you off; get irrate at you for asking where your bill is; provide excuses rather than try and actually find the answer; provide contradictory information or no information at all; pass the buck "it's the printers, it's the bank, etc."; not return phone calls, etc. This is not what we would consider as customer service. And, we have yet to receive any apologies for any of the issues we have been experiencing.

Thirdly, if you are educated in the utilities industry at all, you would realize that they must be accountable for what they do. In other words, they need to be accountable for their actions to the government. If Enmax doesn't provide the customer with the information they require (ie. the bill, the correct account number), they cannot penalize the customer for not paying the bill because the customer might be paying to an old account number which was not correctly transferred. That being said, it is the responsibility of Enmax to make sure their systems can apply payments from an old account number to the new one - not the bank.

Fourthly, an account number and billing cycle change is a HUGE problem if the customer is not advised. If you actually look at the bigger picture than what's in your head, you would recognize this. For example, if your bank changed your account number and didn't notify you and all your auto-payments for your bills got rejected (the dealership couldn't take your monthly car payment and sends you to collections or repossess your vehicle) or your tax refund never got to you because the government wasn't aware of your account number change, would it matter to you? If you were on a fixed income or pension because you're a senior or in the lower-income bracket and you only got paid once on the 5th of the month but you need to have your bills paid by the 1st of the month or else you have no power or electricity, would it matter?

So, before you write a comment about how we should pay our bills, you need to learn to read the full blog, understand the utilities industry, the billing industry, the banking industry (in which by the way, we are very educated in), look at the bigger picture of how many people this actually affects (how socially responsible is a company when they tell the UCA that it only affects about 300 people when they change ALL the account numbers? We doubt Enmax only has 300 customers). Perhaps you need to look at the "grand scheme of things" before you accuse others of whining when all they had wanted was their bill and to have it be accurate so they could pay it, and to have answers to their questions so that they are aware of what's going on so that future payments of their bills will actually get credited to their accounts.