LANSING – Consumers Energy will fully comply with the Public Service Commission’s order on Thursday that it pay a fine of more than $518,000 in relation to its billing practices of providing customers will estimates for some 16 months.
“We recognize that our performance on this issue does not reflect our standards of customer service, and we are committed to making this right,” the company said in a statement. “A comprehensive plan launched in November to address customers with consecutive estimated bills has been fully executed. As of May 1, the company met its commitment outlined in its February report to the PSC to reduce the number of customer accounts with three or more months of consecutively estimated bills by more than 75 percent.”
The company also said it would look at making more monthly visits to homes or businesses when necessary to ensure customers are receiving estimated bills based on actual meter reads, as well as seeking customer access for an actual meter read.
“We are confident this will improve our meter read rate for all customers and further lessen the problem of consecutive estimated bills,” Consumers said. “As a result of our focused efforts, the actual meter read rate has increased to 97 percent on a monthly basis.”
The company is also upgrading its meter technology to reduce estimated bills for electric customers and customers with combination electric-and-gas accounts, a service expected to be in place by year-end 2017. It said it had upgraded meter technology to more than 1 million customers, with plans to complete nearly another 1 million upgrades this year.
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