Domestic Liberty Keypad Pay as You Go
At the Utility Industry Awards December 2004, the judges made up of industry experts singled out the NIE Keypad metering project and felt it deserved to be in a category of it's own. The judges were bowled over by this scheme. "It had the wow factor"
The judges further commented;
On a conservative estimate it was worth between £500 million and £1 billion in savings to the UK mainland suppliers. Not only does it impact dramatically on the bottom line but it demonstrates awesome customer satisfaction rates, "Head and shoulders above anything else," truly amazing.
Cost to serve
- Keypad uses a virtual key in the form of an encrypted code and therefore does not have the added cost of tokens an average of 20% of all tokens issued are lost or stolen = value of £70K per 100K Key meters.
- In the period 2002-2004 it cost the industry £34 million to convert direct debit customers to PP and PP customers back to direct debit (source Social Action Plan) with Keypad this is done remotely at no cost.
- Debt is managed on the Client Software and not held in the meter allowing for better debt transfer and management.
- No mis-directed payments and associated costs.
- Eliminates fraud Tamper and fraud detection: Comprehensive tamper and fraud detection allow phase failures, reverse energy, non power up resets, missing neutrals etc. to be time/date stamped and reported. In addition to the meter-based features, the vending system can be set up to report abnormal vending patterns which can assist in the identification of potential fraud cases.
- No token acceptance problems/call outs.
- Metering asset more durable than token meters better return on CAPEX
Customer satisfaction
- No forced disconnections during Holidays and weekends.
- No Bills.
- Flexible vending infrastructure.
- Easy access to consumption data (Freedom unit).
- Pay only for consumption.
Energy Efficiency
Where Liberty has been introduced there have been many cases of improved energy efficiency gains - the last study achieved an average saving of 11%. This is currently under evaluation by the Carbon Trust and may even form part of EEC 2 programme in the future.
Liberty can be deployed as a current limiting device thus reducing disconnections and enforcing an appropriate budgeting regime according to each individual's circumstances thus reducing fuel poverty.
www.intergage.co.uk
