Things should return to normal soon, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of VINLEC Dr Vaughn Lewis has said.
This follows the recent anxiety amongst consumers of electricity after the electric company embarked on a drive to recover outstanding funds owed.
“We have a credit control section in our customer service department that works very hard to help to collect outstanding debt,” Lewis said on the July 30 edition of ‘Issues at Hand’.
“What has happened recently is that we have added a few more resources for a period due to that fact that the debt is growing quite quickly and is having an impact on the operations of the company,” he continued.
And over the past week or so, the company added more resources to that effort, Lewis explained, and operations are expected to return to a ‘steady state of operation soon’.
What was unusual about this drive, VINLEC’s CEO said was that more teams had been added over the period and this was due to the growing problem he said of consumers not settling their bills on time.
During that period, Lewis said that a list of between 600 and 700 consumers was generated for disconnection.
“We have a customer base of about 48,000 persons so the number of disconnections that we have done is definitely less than 2 percent, and the majority of persons who were disconnected did settle their bills,” the CEO explained.
Lewis further explained that to get on the disconnection list, customers would have had to use at least two months electricity without making a payment.
“We bill after a month’s usage and then there is a month to pay, beyond that period the name on the account goes on to a disconnection list,” Lewis said.
Among the list of customers down to be disconnected were those owing slightly beyond that two-month point and there were others owing for a period of months beyond the two-month point.
Customers that were disconnected in the recent drive were from across the residential and commercial categories, according to Lewis, with outstanding debt ranging between EC$500 into EC$20,000 to EC$30,000.
“And our credit control team continue to speak with all levels of customers in the bracket that is lower,” he said.
But while some customers were left in the dark, the CEO said that there was an increased drive to remind people to settle their bill.
According to Lewis, it is not unusual for the credit control department to contact customers on a workday basis to get them to settle their outstanding bills.
He however admitted that not everyone is contacted and he explained that the reason for this was that in some instances VINLEC did not contact updated information, for example a new telephone number for some consumers and he said that the company simply did not have the capacity to call all consumers.
“We are beefing up our customer service capacity to have a greater outreach but 100 percent of persons on the disconnection list were not contacted because some we do not have their contacts and we do not have the capacity to call everyone on the disconnection list because the numbers are higher than the team can manage,” Lewis said.