Complaints process

If you submit your complaint online, we’ll call you to discuss it. When we call, we ask for your details and confirm you’re the account holder.

If you’re not the account holder, we need to get their permission to speak to you, by either:

• speaking to them on the phone
• asking them to complete an Authority to act form.

If you’re the account holder but you’re paying someone to work on your behalf, we need your verbal or written permission to speak to them about your account. Our dispute resolution service is free, so you can choose to contact us directly or have your paid representative talk to us.

First we make sure we can help with your type of complaint. If we can’t help, we tell you who to contact for assistance.

If it’s a complaint we can help with, we will either refer the issue to a higher level within your energy or water company or start an investigation. We will explain these options to you. If you’re part of an embedded network, there may not be the option of referring your complaint to a higher level. In this instance, we’ll start investigating your complaint.

If your complaint is a disagreement about a dollar amount, we may ask you to pay the part of the bill that you don’t disagree with.

We work with you and your provider through our dispute resolution process to get a fair and reasonable result. If at any stage we can’t continue with our process, we explain why.

We may ask someone at a higher level in your energy or water provider to see if they can fix your problem:

1. We contact them to explain your complaint and the result you want.
2. They call or write to you to discuss the problem within 5 business days.
3. If your problem isn’t fixed through this process, you can contact us again for more help.
4. If we don’t hear from you, we usually contact you after 3 weeks to see how it’s going.

If your energy provider is an embedded network and doesn’t have someone at a higher level we can talk to, we’ll start investigating your complaint.

It may be more appropriate for us to investigate your problem:

1. We send your energy or water company a ‘notice of investigation’ that explains your problem and how you’d like it fixed. We ask them to tell us what they can do to fix it.
2. We read their response and ask them for more information if we need it. If the investigation is complex, this could take some time.
3. When we’re happy with their response, we contact you to discuss the result.

We update you about our progress regularly and keep investigating until either we get a fair and reasonable result or there’s no reason to keep investigating. An investigation usually takes about 20 business days, depending how complex the problem is.

At the end of the investigation, we send you a notice that the case is closed, which contains the investigation findings and any agreed solution. If your provider breaks this agreement, you should contact us.

In rare situations where we can’t get a fair and reasonable result that you and your provider can agree on, the Ombudsman may make a final order.

Read our final orders.