Our local natural gas supplier has seemingly been going through an identity crisis that has not noticeably improved their customer service delivery.
For the first thirteen or so years at this house, the natural gas came from PSNC.
They’d send a bill, I’d queue up the payment through the credit union’s bill payment portal to be electronically transmitted the day it was due and all was well with the world.
They got bought by Dominion Energy from Virginia and even through the change in name, they’d send an EMAIL with how much they wanted and when they wanted paid, I’d queue the payment, and they’d happily leave me be for the next month.
Fairly quickly after that buyout, Dominion sold the NC natural gas operations they’d just purchased to Enbridge which is a gas company based in Canada. Now I’ve got several theories as to why Dominion didn’t stick around for the long haul but as long as I get that EMAIL and I queue up the payment and never have to deal with them past that, I don’t really care whose *NAME* is on the bill.
They supply natural gas to the water heater (and theoretically the gas logs that haven’t worked for ages and I haven’t had the money to mend anyway), they send a bill, I queue the payment, they leave me alone.
That’s really the extent of the relationship I want with these people.
So come August, I get the EMAIL at the beginning of the month as I have for many years…I queue up the payment without a second thought, and figured all was well.
Imagine my surprise when the next billing EMAIL from them was demanding twice the usual amount!
What I didn’t know at the time was that Enbridge completely replaced their payment processing system and like the other companies engaged in this sort of stupidity, it seems absolutely clear they not only didn’t test this thing before it went live but also their communication of the impending changes and the dire effects it would have on them properly processing payments left a lot to be desired.
Not only did they change the billing system wholesale, they also completely changed the customer account numbers and the billing lockbox, both of which are required for online bill payment systems to function properly!
Of course, a responsible corporation would move heaven and earth to communicate this well in advance through as many channels as possible.
But when I checked the EMAILs that emanated from their system that was sent to my mail server, only the billing EMAILs that always seem to make it through were there. There were no EMAILs from them in the junk folders nor any indication that Enbridge ever even attempted to send any EMAIL indicating such a massive change nor any call to action to change the billing details on any bill payment service.
None.
You’d think that a responsible corporation would send a notice through the post even for customers that opted for electronic communication which they didn’t bother to do either well ahead of the go-live date to ensure that payments that were properly queued didn’t go missing.
At the very least, a responsible corporation would have given some sort of indication in the bill (whether paper sent via post or the PDF version available on their portal) that such a change was imminent and give plenty of warning as to the catastrophic consequences of inaction by the customer.
Not one bill for the entire year mentioned this brand new payment processing system or even tried to sell the “improved customer experience” line that’s usually equivalent to the substance that comes out of the southbound end of a northbound bovine.
When I rang them up to try to figure out what was going on, I would discover that these people were everything but responsible.
Making The Call To Customer Service…Welcome To Hell!
The VRU is truly painful to navigate and gave a fifteen minute estimate to getting to an agent.
Fair dinkum, it’s a Monday morning and the VRU frequently broke in to inform us of the delays caused by many customers calling in about billing and gaining access to their portal but curiously didn’t admit that the reason the call volumes are through the roof is that their billing operations and IT are breathtakingly incompetent and that their lack of communication about the new system and completely new account numbers screwed a lot of customers in the process.
It actually took 24 minutes for “Brandi” to come on the blower and she wanted to verify my ZIP code (OK) and…date of birth?!?
Not only is that completely weird, it’s also easy information for anyone to impersonate the actual account holder…you’ve not really verified I am who I say I am.
Mind you, who else but the account holder would even bother to call about a missed payment? A scammer isn’t going to have any interest in a call centre that not only can’t send them money but won’t.
Her first tack after having the problem explained to her in clear English was to blame me for not going to their web portal where they apparently communicated this information.
Why would I even think to go there especially when I’ve had zero need for ever logging into the portal in the previous 15 years?
If Enbridge had even bothered to communicate anything in the three places I was already likely to see the message (the monthly billing EMAIL that arrives like clockwork, the bill, or a special notice in the post), how could “Brandi” possibly presume that I’d automatically think to go to that web portal for an announcement that first shows up two months before *GO LIVE* with two small updates in early July…and crickets since?
When it became patently obvious that I wasn’t going to get anywhere productive with “Brandi”, I asked to speak to her supervisor.
She decides that apparently the “verification” she demanded earlier wasn’t sufficient so she effectively is holding me hostage unless I give her the last four digits of my Social Security number.
I tried to reasonably explain to her that is the absolute worst number to use for verification for any number of reasons including the fact that it is not guaranteed to be unique, there is no way to check the number itself to ensure it’s valid, and that anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the holder of the SSN can guess the other five numbers without too much difficulty.
It’s appalling enough that our government has never fixed this problem but it’s even worse that non-governmental entities demand to use it whether you wish them to or not. In this case, I never gave them my SSN when I originally signed up for service but that didn’t stop them from taking my SSN surreptitiously from the worst of the three major credit bureaus…Equifax.
”Brandi’s” considered response to that logic was more than a little predictable…she intentionally dropped the call even though I told her several times that I’d give in to her blackmail if it’d move the process along.
The Second Call Was Hardly An Improvement…
The second call immediately after being intentionally connected went out immediately and even though the estimate was still 15 minutes due to heightened call volume for reasons we already know well, it took 29 minutes for “Jada” to come on the phone.
I wasn’t in a mood to waste my time with her and immediately requested to be connected to a supervisor.
She wanted to know what I wanted to talk about and I really wasn’t interested in having to tell the story twice especially as it pertained to matters above her pay grade but no dice.
Enbridge apparently has a “process” where the first-level agents have to fill out a template form on their end to even get a supervisor to “take the call”.
And wouldn’t you know it…part of that “template” involves demanding the last four digits of the SSN. Given how much “Brandi” didn’t care about how dangerously stupid it is to bandy that number about on an unsecured wireless phone connection, I didn’t even bother trying to provide a sense of perspective to her.
My reward for that was a sarcastic “thank you for complying with our process”.
Well, you didn’t exactly give me much of a choice!
It took her another six minutes before supervisor “Nicholas” came on the line.
What An Amazing Supervisor!
So with “Nicholas”, I go through the whole spiel for the *THIRD TIME* of how it’d have been incredibly helpful if Enbridge had bothered to notify me of the account number change and like “Brandi”, “Nicholas” got complete fixated on out-of-band EMAILs that were never sent and a brief and very late announcement on a website I never had any need to visit.
Once he realises that I’m no more willing to accept that load of bovine faeces from him than I was “Brandi”, he then switches his tack to try to argue that my credit union’s bill payment system was sending the payments via a paper cheque and that it’s a failure on their end.
It didn’t seem to matter to him in the slightest that at that moment I’m literally looking at the previous payments sent to them that not only indicate they were sent electronically (including the one that was queued up after the account number got changed out from under me!) and that I had a confirmation number for all of them.
I even pointed out the one biller that up to this point hadn’t figured out that electronic funds transfer is much better than trusting an increasingly untrustworthy US Postal Service with a paper cheque showed that a paper check was sent and there’s an image of the check that is accessible.
Nope, he couldn’t be bothered to believe what I was literally reading to him from the credit union site and demanded that I call up their support to figure out what had happened and then ring Enbridge back because their “payment processing IT people can’t call the credit union themselves”.
What a galactically stupid suggestion that was on multiple fronts!
Number one…I’m now over a hour into two phone calls with these people and had to fight to get a supposed supervisor’s ear and now he wants me to jump to the back of the queue?
I had to jump onto the credit union’s site and engage their vastly superior customer support via chat (who was awfully surprised to learn that the lockbox address had changed) to verify in real time that the payment made electronically.
Enbridge stated in their FAQ page that even if the payment came in with the old account number, it’d be recognised by the system and properly credited to the new one except that did not seem to be the case here.
”Nicholas” then demanded that I EMAIL proof of what I was telling him to contactus@enbridge.com addressed to him.
Never mind that it’s really Enbridge’s job to do this and they’re not paying me enough to do their job for them and waste even more of my valuable time that I normally bill at $150/hr to people I really loathe (which would include them after this incident), I didn’t really see any choice but to comply.
After all, the attitude of “we’re the gas company, we don’t care, we don’t have to” was coming through loud and clear and that message was definitely received on this end!
I even told him that’s how his attitude was coming across multiple times and he never denied it nor did he even bother apologising for all of the hassle and heartache Enbridge had caused me (and likely thousands of other customers as reflected in the call volumes).
At this point, I’m asking him for an ombudsman where most corporations tend to have a person you can speak to when customer service goes completely off the rails.
Quelle surprise…they don’t have anyone in that role even though they very clearly need one.
This is when “Nicholas” really put his foot squarely in it by practically daring me to bring this matter to the attention of the NC Utilities Commission.
Should We Or Should We Not Follow The Suggestion Of The Galactically Stupid?!?
I’m genuinely perplexed why a supervisor would even suggest that much less to someone who is clearly unhappy with a completely unacceptable level of “customer service” from a big energy corporation who completely botched a rollout of a payment processing system that at best was minimally tested before “go live” and a complete failure to properly communicate the changes to mitigate billing chaos that is the direct result of their incompetence.
In the EMAIL I sent to him along with the proof I should never have had to, I pointed out that the one aspect of it that I’d expect any reasonable regulator would take an exceptionally dim view of was the Enbridge’s decision to apparently rely solely on their web portal to communicate such a massive change and likely some bean-counter suggesting to do it on the cheap.
They should have at a minimum sent a letter (or two) to each account holder through the Postal Service well in advance of the go-live date.
That wouldn’t be cheap but I’d imagine it’d be a lot cheaper than the fines and paperwork I would hope that the NC Utilities Commission will subject Enbridge to when this complaint comes their way.
”Nicholas” seemed unfazed by the prospect of their regulator actually doing any regulation.
If the recent history between Duke Energy and the NC Utilities Commission is anything to go by, it seems clear that the Utilities Commission is more often the industry’s poodle rather than an effective regulator given how many Duke Energy riders have been foisted upon us to say nothing of the absolute debacle Duke Energy’s (well, their predecessor Progress) utter incompetence in not properly lining coal ash settling ponds.
That huge mistake led to the polluting a major water supply which was passed along as massively inflated costs to the rate payers who should have never been on the hook for poor and environmentally devastating decisions that the utility should have known better as the supposed “experts”.
So he may well be right to not fear regulation from the NC Utilities Commission or the Public Staff who seem to be quite comfortable and cozy in Duke Energy’s pockets.
On the other hand, Enbridge isn’t the 800 pound gorilla that Duke Energy is thanks to the majority of the Jones Street Mob on Duke Energy’s payroll (either officially or through bribes thinly disguised as “campaign donations” or other less savoury and likely illegal means).
The Utilities Commission is certainly in need of a big PR win given how their lax regulation of Duke Energy has royally pissed off more than a few voters recently and coming down hard on Enbridge might well be such an easy PR win.
Or the Public Staff might be bored and be interested in something to do.
Either way, it doesn’t seem to be the smartest move of a supposed supervisor who has already committed the cardinal sin by continuing to piss off the customer and let them leave the conversation quite angry to compound the error by challenging a rate payer you’ve not really satisfied to contact the group of people in this state that can actually make your life miserable if they can be bothered to do so.
So, I’ll be granting that wish and let the NC Utilities Commission have a go at them and hope that they’ll be properly sanctioned and at least this time in a way that doesn’t get dumped on the rate payers.
These utilities will never bother to improve their operations if their executives aren’t personally disgorged of their profits when their monopoly fails to operate in the public interest.
The Aftermath
Enbridge apparently managed to find the payment that had been queued for them in a timely fashion by 02 Sep 2026, three days after this appalling customer service interaction occurred.
It should come as no surprise that there was no return EMAIL confirming receipt of the proof that I’d sent them much less that they’d managed to find the wayward payment and that my good name had been restored to me.
I had to discover that myself when I saw the transaction come through my credit union and logged into the Enbridge portal to confirm.
I had strongly suggested in the EMAIL I sent to “Nicholas” that a real apology from them for their disgraceful and dishonourable behaviour was definitely in order and that it needed to come from the executive suite in the post.
I’m not holding my breath on that happening, either.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if “Nicholas” tries to just bury this whole encounter and hope for the best even in the face of him challenging me to do the one thing that would force at least a response from the company.
There’s a funny thing about naval tactics…one should never put a torpedo into the water if you’re not absolutely sure about what it is going to hit.
I rather hope the NC Utilities Commission comes down on Enbridge rather hard to really impart that lesson to them.
And then the consequences can also come to the people who will get all of the credit for why this customer service interaction went to hell in the first place… 🙁