Then other things came up, and then it was Christmas, and then more things. In September 2017, we started work on a prototype. Then we settled on a wheel, thinking it would be fun to offer different kinds of prizes. First it was going to look like a slot machine.

Someone asked “Can we make a bit of a game out of it? Something you can play when you give readings online?” The idea went through various evolutions from there. The more we can get our technology to do for them, the more efficient our business is, and the cheaper we can make your energy bills.

Though we’re absolutely always happy to help with any query, our tech team like automating little work-arounds like this, so our team are freed up to help with the really complex problems that need someone to write a personal response, or be there to take a phone call, that no amount of automation or clever technology can solve. This saves our customers and our team a little time. We wanted to do this to save our hard-working and talented energy experts from too much copying and pasting of meter readings from emails, and encourage customers to use our super easy online function to submit theirs instead. Back in the early days (when we still measured customers in the thousands, and our office was one floor of a condemned building in Soho) we wondered whether we could offer people a reward for submitting readings online. So we encourage all our customers to give regular meter readings however they can. Regular meter readings help us understand your energy usage over the year, which helps us work out how much a regular monthly payment for you should be. No one likes an estimated bill that might see you pay too much, or – if it’s too low – set you up for a surprise higher bill in the future. Without accurate meter readings, we have to resort to that most fickle of tools: estimation. On a larger scale, we need to be able to calculate how much energy our customers use altogether, so that we know how much green energy we need to buy from our renewable sources to put into the grid. Meter readings are how we can tell how much energy you use, which we need to give you an accurate bill. They’re the foundation of everything we provide for customers. Meter readings are absolutely vital to our business.

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