Throughout 2023, Madrileña Red de Gas continued to improve its customer service process, despite the setbacks suffered in recent years, such as the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which had a significant impact on the gas sector.

Proof of this continuous improvement lies in the increase in the overall satisfaction level of our customers, due in no small part to the high level of service in all channels and operations of the company, and especially to the changes carried out in the scheduled inspection service and the improvements in communication through our WhatsApp channel.

3.1 Customer support

Madrileña Red de Gas strives to provide a better service in gas distribution to its users, and the end customer continues to value these actions positively

The clearest proof of good management at Madrileña Red de Gas in terms of customer service can be found in the strengthening of a more efficient process. The most significant achievements include the fall in the number of customers without a real reading in a year, from 3.25% of our distributed customers to 2.26%. In turn, customer complaints related to readings have fallen and the company’s wastage balance has been reduced.

Madrileña Red de Gas strives to provide a better service in gas distribution to its users, and the end customer continues to value these actions positively.

This combination of good results is largely due to the continuous improvement and change of management tools.

Significantly, there was an increase in the use of the WhatsApp channel by the company’s customers.

In 2023 Madrileña Red de Gas managed a total of 54,944 applications, the highest number in recent years.

The goal for Madrileña Red de Gas is to keep the customer informed, both of its own processes and of readings or scheduled inspections, and in terms of the requests received from supply companies.

Administrative disconnectionss

The latest revision of the regulations, carried out in 2017 by the National Commission on Financial Markets and Competition (CNMC), generated an abnormal situation that we call administrative disconnection, allowing customers to terminate their gas contract with their supplier, even when it had not been possible to remove the meter. This is an unsafe situation that may potentially lead to future fraud.

In this regard, we have undertaken constant monitoring together with our partner companies. The reasons that prevented the termination from taking place have been assessed on a case-by-case basis, making it possible to identify the best course of action for each supply point.

Technological developments have also been used to achieve this objective. From August 2023, an improvement was implemented to automate the sending of a WhatsApp message to all customers when the supply point enters administrative deregistration status.

Another of the measures implemented has been to employ the help of the technical resources (vertical operations) of both partner companies and thus gain access to meters that are difficult to access.

Finally, we continue to send our customers a physical letter informing them of their situation.

The actions undertaken in 2023 have led to a 50% reduction in the volume of disconnections: from a figure of 3,500 disconnections, there are now 1,713 supply points in this situation.

Looking ahead, we will continue to work along the same lines to further reduce the number of irregular supply points.

3.2 Digital communication

Madrileña Red de Gas never ceases to remind its customers of the need to take a real reading at least once a year and of the convenience of billing real readings whenever possible. To this end, it offers a variety of communication options. These include:

• Virtual Office: which connects the client with Madrileña Red de Gas in the reading area.
• Emails: which inform the client of when their reading period begins.
• WhatsApp: which allows the end client to manage readings and reminds them of their obligation to allow access or send a photo reading.

Through these and other digital channels, Madrileña Red de Gas helps enable customers to provide the company with their meter readings, which has substantially reduced the number of readings recorded through the call centre.

Customers who provided their readings chose the following channels: Virtual Office (80.16%), WhatsApp (up from 9.38% to 15.51%), IVR (automated voice service) (3.94%) and calls to call centre agents (0.24%).

As the figures show, the Virtual Office is the preferred channel for customers to provide readings, with WhatsApp rising in popularity for this purpose.

Additionally, in the context of a gas environment with pricing risk and with customers paying greater attention to their natural gas consumption and bills, Madrileña Red de Gas succeeded in reducing the number of complaints made by customers through different channels.

The combined efforts of the Madrileña Red de Gas team to alleviate the doubts of end customers in the different processes produced great results in terms of meter readings.

The benefits of a deregulated system, which allows for customers to react to prices by switching supplier, mean that distributors need the ability to administratively manage the large number of estimated readings during the process, among other issues. By improving how these readings are treated, as they are subsequently corrected with real readings or readings provided by the customer, the complaints ratio inevitably falls.

A small but very efficient change in the switching process has led to a reduction in complaints, thanks to more accurate management: a wait time of 48 hours is now in place before the switch is activated, giving customers the opportunity to provide their reading and avoid any potential disagreements.

Likewise, by providing more information on the chronology of readings and on the result of the reading that will be billed by the retailer, the number of queries received has been reduced, without forgetting the homogenisation and optimisation of the responses to these complaints. This has been successful in reducing repeat incidents.

3.3 Loyalty

After five years undertaking initiatives aimed at improving the customer experience, and despite the situations experienced in recent years such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and their huge impact on the energy sector, Madrileña Red de Gas continues to grow in terms of its customer service provision.

The company has achieved an average customer satisfaction score of almost 9 through its WhatsApp channel, and an 8.3 overall for the company as a whole, as a result of the high level of service across all channels and operations. This rating is due in particular to the boost provided by the regular inspection service and the WhatsApp channel.

In addition, Madrileña Red de Gas continues to be unbeatable in Google My Business (GMB), with more than 11,000 reviews and an average rating of 4 out of 5. It should be noted that this good performance coincides with an unprecedented escalation in the volume of contacts from our customers, especially for billing and reading issues, due to the high gas prices in the winter of 2023.

Because of the high level of self-service, the best practices implemented in its processes and operations, with the focus on customer experience, and the quality of all its customer service channels, Madrileña Red de Gas holds the best Google My Business (GMB) rating in the sector.

Finally, in its continuous search for improvement and excellence in service quality, in 2023 Madrileña Red de Gas worked hard in all business areas to minimise repeated contacts by a customer for the same reason. The cause of queries, concerns and complaints is always sought in order to avoid them as far as possible, providing more information and transparency or a solution at the first contact, without the need for the customer to contact the customer service channels again for the same reason.

3.4 Operations at the customer

Once again in 2023, Madrileña Red de Gas focused on reducing the wastage balance. Reducing emissions (18%) plays a key role in this. The lower the consumption, the lower the percentage of wastage balance in a company with a majority of domestic customers.

In this environment, and despite the expense involved, Madrileña Red de Gas does not cease to monitor consumers with anomalous consumption and/or more than 12 months without a real reading, helping to optimise visits to the end customer.

Initiatives that have led to numerous meter changes in the event of fraud or faults include field visits to detect fraud, scheduled inspections with meter reading of customers with no real reading, managing meter anomalies reported by readers and installing remote metering for customers who are not obliged to do so by law.

Madrileña Red de Gas’s initiative to install remote metering for a considerable group of non-obligated customers allows for greater control of consumption and, therefore, a direct effect in terms of the balance of wastage.

In turn, it allows them to opt for the capacity-based billing method (Art.26 point 4 of CNMC Circular 6/2020, of 22 July, which establishes the methodology for calculating natural gas transmission, local networks and regasification tolls). The possibility of requesting this billing method brings different advantages to the customer, such as:

• Times of consumption are recorded and can be adjusted.
• An economic benefit, due to the tolls applied by the billing method.

This has required a great deal of effort, but it has proven to be a significant achievement to evaluate and replace the remote metering technology of these non-obligated customers in order to achieve greater efficiency.

Home operations

For Madrileña Red de Gas, 2023 was one of the best years in its history in terms of household operations, with figures of 96% in reopenings and 93% in terminations at the request of customers.

These successes are the result of extensive data collection in the field, which has led to an increase in the percentage of appointments made and exhaustive weekly monitoring of partner companies.

After a one-off deviation in defaults during the month of May 2023, this indicator was brought back on track, and the year ended with 0.8%.

Other noteworthy results in the area of home-based operations include:

• Complaints processing: 98% of complaints processed within one day have remained.
• The quality control rate during 2023 has been 99%, with no alarming cases.
• In the maintenance of IRC (common receiving facilities) there has not been a single delay in commissioning beyond 48 hours.
• Customer satisfaction has risen from 6.4 in 2022 to 6.9 in 2023.

Scheduled inspection

Throughout 2023, Madrileña Red de Gas maintained the achievements made in 2022 in terms of scheduled inspections, meeting its targets and optimising processes to improve this trend.

Since the start of the campaign, the volume of inspections carried out has exceeded the target set. The year ended with a 98% success rate (160,028 inspections performed)

Since the start of the campaign, the volume of inspections carried out has exceeded the target set. The year ended with a 98% success rate (160,028 inspections performed).

This translates into 9,700 inspections performed above the target and a visit non-compliance of below 1%.

On the other hand, in 2023 Madrileña Red de Gas decided to include the litreage in installations pending meter revision in the scheduled inspection process, in order to detect and rectify anomalous meter situations. An 85% success rate was achieved in the litreages; 1.06% of incidents were detected and all have been corrected.

Another key to the good results achieves remains the permanent communication with our customers through the different channels provided. These communications have been subject to continuous change, and we have adapted to customer demands as observed in the complaints received, reviews and surveys.

We are also continuously improving the information provided to customers who have defects in the scheduled inspection. We explain how to rectify them, sending reminders of deadlines for them to send us the proof of correction of anomalies (JCA). This has increased the number of JCAs received before issuing the cut-off notice to 94%.

As a result, in 2023 Madrileña Red de Gas achieved excellent results in terms of scheduled inspection.