Meridian Annual Report - Meridian Energy

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Meridian provides electricity to around 183,000
customers, which includes households, farms,
and businesses throughout New Zealand.
Our Customers
Meridian provides electricity to around 183,000 customers,
which includes households, farms, and businesses throughout
New Zealand.
As well as supplying carboNZero certTM certified electricity, we are
very competitive in our pricing structures. We have also offered a
low user tariff to our customers for the past six years in line with
Government requirements.
Our customers include New Zealand’s largest single power user,
Rio Tinto Alcan’s aluminium smelter, which takes around 40 percent
of our generation. Rio Tinto Alcan is a long standing key customer
and we are focused on servicing its needs. The smelter is highly
significant for the Southland region and New Zealand in terms of
the jobs and the export earnings it provides.
We have large concentrations of retail household customers in
Christchurch and Northland as well as customers throughout the
rest of New Zealand. The retail electricity sector is becoming more
competitive and we closely monitor our ‘churn’ rate.
Providing safe and reliable electricity is a responsibility which we
take very seriously. We communicate with our customers about how
to make better use of electricity as well as listening to what they
say about the services we provide. Our retail customers receive the
quarterly newsletter Currents, as well as information about new
services, pricing changes or other issues we feel they should be
aware of. The ongoing installation of smart meters in Christchurch
is a project which will significantly improve the way we communicate
and interact with our customers, and will provide increasing
benefits to householders in the future.
We measure our customer satisfaction levels by regular surveys
conducted by Colmar Brunton. Our goal is to continue to improve
our survey approval ratings. We achieved that with our residential
customer satisfaction rising over the year from 55 percent to 60
percent whilst our SME statistics show a steady rise from 46 percent
to 52 percent.
We also conduct in-depth research to find out what our customers
think about us. We segment this into our residential, small business
and corporate customers and the results are heartening. Our overall
performance in both small business and corporate markets over
the past two years ranks us better than our competitors and in the
residential segment we were ranked second.
We measure attributes such as the quality of our call centre staff,
how effective our tips on electricity consumption are, how we resolve
problems and whether we are providing accurate billing.
The results of this research help to shape the improvements we are
continually making to Meridian’s customer experience.