Chief Marketing Officer / Europe
Three decisions that gave up sales to keep trust
- Electricity and gas supply contracts
- 455,000
- Households and small businesses, end of 2025
- Annual revenue
- €640M
- 2025; €1.12 billion at 2022 prices
- Household switching-away rate
- 12.6%
- 2025, down from 19.1% in 2023
Decisions & consequences
01Raising advance payments before the winter bill could do it for us
Late in August 2022, wholesale gas and electricity prices in Belgium stood at several times their level a year earlier, and 212,000 of our contracts were on variable prices. Most of those households were still paying monthly advances set for the old prices. Finance calculated that, without a change, their average settlement bill the following year would exceed €1,400.
A household that receives a bill of that size is likely to fall into arrears, call in anger and leave. Our sales director argued that writing about higher advances in September would drive customers to competitors that were keeping advances low. I argued that the bill would arrive regardless, and that the only question was whether customers heard about it from us first. The chief executive supported the proposal. We also agreed to stop selling fixed-price contracts, because trading could not hedge them at a price we could defend.
We wrote to every variable-price household with a proposed new advance, an average rise from €165 to €310 a month for dual-fuel customers, and an explanation of the federal winter discounts applied to bills. Customers could accept, choose a lower amount or decline. Customer service added 60 temporary advisers.
Sixty-four per cent accepted the proposed advance or a figure close to it. Their average settlement bill in 2023 was €210; for those who declined, it was €1,140. Quarterly switching-away rose from 4.1 to 6.0 per cent at the end of 2022, and new sales fell by 71 per cent during the fourteen weeks without fixed offers. Bad-debt write-offs for 2023 came to 1.9 per cent of revenue, against the 3.2 per cent finance had modelled.
We now review advances against forward prices every quarter instead of once a year. I would put the payment-plan offer in the first letter. We sent it separately two weeks later, and the households that most needed it were the least likely to open a second envelope.
Withdrawing our own '100 per cent green' claim while competitors kept theirs
Until 2023, our standard electricity tariff was sold as 100 per cent green. The claim rested on origin certificates, most of them from Norwegian hydroelectric plants, bought separately from the electricity we purchased on the wholesale market. It was lawful and common practice. Our research showed that 58 per cent of customers on the tariff believed their power came from Belgian wind or solar farms, and complaints about the claim, while still few, had doubled in a year.
The green tariff accounted for 31 per cent of our online sign-ups. Our brand director warned that changing the wording while competitors kept theirs would hand them customers, and legal colleagues confirmed that the claim was defensible. My concern was what a customer would conclude on learning how it worked. I proposed removing the phrase from all advertising and from the tariff name, publishing the country and technology behind every certificate we cancelled, and launching a separate product backed by certificates and purchase agreements from Belgian wind and solar producers, priced €4 a month higher. The executive committee agreed after two meetings. The brand director remained opposed and asked for that to be minuted.
We renamed the tariff, rewrote about 140 web pages and documents, briefed customer-service advisers on how origin certificates work and wrote to 96,000 existing customers explaining the change.
Online green-tariff conversion fell from 31 to 22 per cent for six months before recovering to 27 per cent. The Belgian-origin product reached 41,000 contracts by the end of 2025, at a margin €18 a year lower per contract than planned, because local certificates cost more than assumed. Complaints about our environmental claims fell almost to nothing, and when European rules restricting generic environmental claims were adopted in 2024, we had little left to change.
I would test the new wording with customers before publishing it. Our first explanation used the term 'origin certificate' without defining it, and about 4,000 customers called to ask whether their electricity had changed.
Telephoning 23,400 households before their social tariff ended
During the pandemic and the price crisis that followed, the federal government temporarily widened the social tariff to households receiving increased reimbursement of healthcare costs. The tariff is applied automatically through federal data, and many of these customers did not know they had it. When the widening ended in 2023, about 23,400 of our households were due to move to commercial prices. For a typical dual-fuel customer, that meant several hundred euros more a year.
Many had low incomes, and a standard price-change letter would arrive in an envelope they had learnt to dread. Collections wanted to apply our usual reminder sequence and payment-plan rules. Some sales colleagues proposed offering these customers our solar and heat-pump bundles as they chose a new contract. I opposed both. I proposed calling every affected household before the change, offering our cheapest fixed contract and a payment plan where useful, and excluding the group from all cross-selling and win-back campaigns for twelve months. The cost was €620,000, mostly for 30 temporary advisers, and the plan delayed our autumn acquisition campaign by six weeks.
Collections and customer-service leads trained the advisers, who had each household’s projected annual cost on screen during the call. We wrote to those we missed, then called again. We shared our contact plan with several municipal social-welfare centres that asked for it.
We reached 71 per cent of the households by telephone. 9,800 moved to a fixed contract and 3,100 agreed payment plans. A year later, arrears beyond sixty days in the group stood at 8.4 per cent, against the 13 per cent collections had projected, and 11 per cent had moved to another supplier, below our overall rate that year. The twelve-month exclusion from selling became standing policy for any household leaving a protected status.
I would involve the social-welfare centres from the start. Several households we never reached were already working with a centre, which could have helped them understand the change before our calls began.