Nick Lightbody's Blog

[back to Deskspace]

A Big Gas Bill: Out of the Blue

Having transferred our domestic Gas Supply to EDF from British Gas in 2003 we were naturally surprised to recently receive bills, out of the blue, from British Gas - claiming that we owed them several hundred pounds. This escalated after about 2 weeks to advising that they were commencing legal action to recover this debt.

Given that we were definitely not a British Gas customer we found this odd, and a little disturbing.

Was this a feature of global warming, or the Russian effect on the UK gas market - maybe they were charging us a suppliment for gas purchased years ago - or a penalty for daring to switch suppliers?

It was none of those things, in fact it appears to be an occurence of Data Transfer Drama.

Apparently many people have suffered similar problems. It appears that the new SAP system they are deploying has suffered teething problems resulting in many thousands of complaints about incorrect billing and accounts.

Energywatch

Having obtained our "Meter Point Reference" from EDF we spoke to Energywatch on 0845 9060708 who very efficiently checked and confirmed that we were indeed served by EDF not British Gas. Can't praise them highly enough, they were patient, efficient and authorative.

If you have a similar problem you can telephone British Gas on 0845 6070870, to escalate your complaint to the highest level.

Data Transfer Drama

In the end British Gas advised that they had a new billing system and that in transferring the data from the old system they had mistakenly allocated our Postal Address to another Gas Meter within the same PostCode.

Thus they knew the postcode area within which their meter was situate but, so they told us, were not certain of the correct address, and thus customer, for the meter, and erroneously allocated our address.

The bills we received were all addressed to "The Occupier", demonstrating that they did not know the identity of their "customer", merely the address.

What exactly has gone wrong?

It would be interesting to hear exactly what has gone wrong here? What is the underlying cause of this Data Transfer Drama?

It appears that the data conversion model may have suffered partial failure since they presumably had the correct addresses related to the relevant meters and Meter Point References under the old system yet appear to have failed to complete a correct transfer of that data?

Whilst it is true that address translation is not always easy it is a pity that British Gas's apparent failure in this case seems to have imposed great stress / inconvenience on many domestic customers receiving erroneous bills.

We await the promised letter of apology.

Update: 15/May/2007: We received an appropriate letter of apology from British Gas as promised.

Update: 15/August/2007: Amazingly we have now received another letter of demand from British Gas - it appears that letters of apology are ignored when a major business has an enormous and unresolved muddle within its data system.

Apparently "Legal Proceedings will be commenced". As we really don't have the time to spend hours on the phone trying to get them to update their records correctly so watch this space.

Update: 21/September/2007: Having used the British Gas Top Level Complaints Tel No above again ( 0845 6070870 ) to make another compliant after receiving further threats of legal proceedings and visits by Bailiffs I spoke with Robert Syson from their customer services who explained the following:

(a) The local delivery grid in our area is owned by another company, no longer Transco

(b) There are meters which British Gas supply in our area, on new housing developments, where they have the meter number and the Plot Number, but no actual postal address.

(c) As they have no actual postal address they send the bills for these new plots to the nearest postal address they have on their system which is not already a known British Gas Customer.

(d) Surprisingly they do not appear to address their bills to the Plot Number on the development.

It appears that although they apologise for the inconvenience caused they do regard guessing the postal address of a new meter and then treating that house holder as their new customer, threatening to sue them for debt etc, as legitimate business practice. Logically I would have thought that they should treat the developer of the new property as their customer until they are advised of the actual postal address.

It does seem amazing that they regard this practice as implicitely reasonable.

If Deskspace had designed their information system we would not have permitted this unfortunate situation to arise.

----ENDS----

[back to Deskspace]

Have attitudes to, and use of colour in, information systems changed over recent years as monitors have got better and the number of things on professionals screens multiplied?

As screens get bigger and better, and many professionals now work on two or more screens, the issue has grown of how best to readily inform the user with appropriate cues about what he or she is looking at.

It is true that shades of neutral grey can be quite pleasing

Received wisdom has been that use of various shades of mid-atlantic grey is safe and generally best. This view has been strengthened where garish colours have been deployed and users have had to resort to dark glasses and aspirins. It is true that shades of grey can be quite pleasing and probably no-one ever got fired for developing a grey interface.

However, where any integrated information system, displaying a wide variety of data, nestles on your desktop amongst a variety of other similarly grey artifacts it can be quite difficult to know immediately what you are looking at and clearly data only becomes information when the user understands what it is they are contemplating.

Can colour improve the user experience?

There are many ways of informing the user but I have long held the view that colour is the best. It is simple, non verbal and quickly becomes intuitive.

So how do you do this well and avoid the aspirin syndrome?

Clearly a good designer is a great start, but we thought maybe there was more to it than just artistic intuition, maybe there was a pattern we could identify and use?

Every software designer worth their salt is an expert at spotting and exploiting patterns, pattern recognition is at the heart of analysing a system and delivering an effective solution.

We took the mathematical approach

Having been guilty in the past of some arguably heavy handed use of the colour brush, we decided to look at the maths. The outcome was a series of colours which had consistent RBG values, different combinations of a limited set of RBG values, where related types of information had colours associated with them which were themselves associated mathematically.

Avoid large areas or blocks of colour.

We took various shades of grey and used minimal areas of the chosen colours, just enough to cue the user subtly so that they would automatically associate each colour with the relevant type of information. We took it as axiomatic that we should avoid any big blocks of strong colour.

Then we used different densities of the colour to signify immediacy, more dense more immediate, less dense less immediate - further away. Fairly simple, but effective.

An unqualified success - "easy on the eye"

The result has been consistent user approval and a complete absence of any desire to make any further changes so we have at least secured feature-lock on colour. Thus I would conclude that professionals are now ready for the introduction of some colour into their lives, provided it is done just right, so it is pleasent to look at - as one client observed - "easy on the eye".

Some questions for you:

1 how do you feel generally about colour in your computer interface?

2 do you associate any colours with happiness?

3 do you associate any colours with sadness?

4 do you associate any colours with success?

5 do you associate any colours with failure?

-----ENDS-----