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Retail Suppliers Slam Utility's Poor Data Quality For "Shockingly Low" (5%) Success Rate in Use of Account Number Look-Up Tool

May 28, 2015

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Copyright 2010-15 EnergyChoiceMatters.com
Reporting by Karen Abbott • kabbott@energychoicematters.com

The NRG Energy retail suppliers reported that the "shockingly low" success rate seen by retail electric suppliers using PECO's remote account number look-up tool is due to the poor data quality of PECO's customer list, and PECO's insistence on a 100% character-for-character match.

By PECO's own account, as of March 22, 2015, the success rate for suppliers searching for customer account numbers using the remote look-up tool (LUT) is very low – just 5% of the searches returned a result of either a match or “on ECL [Eligible Customer List]”.

The NRG retail suppliers said that their work to become more proficient at using PECO's LUT throughout the first four months of 2015 has resulted in an average success rate of 28% (up from a "meager" 5% when the NRG companies first started using the tool in 2014), meaning NRG's searches provide customer account numbers just 28% of the time. "While 28% is better than 5%, this is still a shockingly low success rate," the NRG suppliers said.

"Arguably, neither customers nor EGSs are realizing the full value of their $215,632 investment in PECO's account number look-up tool. Customers and EGSs split the cost of this tool 50/50, with all EGSs paying via an increase in the POR discount rate and customers paying via an additional charge on their bill," the NRG companies said

When use of the LUT and ECL are combined, the success rate of NRG Retail's searches of both the PECO ECL and the LUT is just 76% of the time. "[T]his low success rate means that we are not meeting customer expectations to enroll them for electricity service, resulting in a very poor customer experience," NRG said.

Put another way, "Almost a quarter of the [PECO] customers seeking to enroll with NRG Retail at a public event cannot be enrolled without additional follow-up and outreach to the customer to obtain his or her account number for a transaction the customer believes was already completed at the point of sale," NRG said.

"The very low success rate with searching PECO's LUT is due to the poor quality of the data being searched coupled with strict requirements for 100% character-for-character exact matches across four separate data fields. To make matters worse, the search results that are returned to the user do not indicate which of the data fields have errors and which do not, so a supplier is left to try to guess which fields must be modified when resubmitting the search," NRG said.

"NRG Retail has determined that at most, just over half (56%) of PECO's customer list has good data quality across all of the data fields required by PECO to match a customer account number," the NRG companies said.

According to NRG, roughly half of PECO's customer database suffers from problems that significantly limit NRG Retail's ability to successfully find a customer's account number, including:

1. Name fields that include either a first or middle initial, often with irregular spacing and/or punctuation;

2. Name fields that include a prefix or suffix or some combination (Sr, Jr, III, Dr, Rev, Mr, Mr&Mrs, Mr & Mrs, Mr., etc.), with and without punctuation and often with irregular spacing;

3. Address fields that are not U.S. Postal Service compliant (i.e., no house or street number, address 1 & 2 fields are reversed);

4. Address fields that include property lot numbers (Lot 53) or house descriptions (i.e., “colonial” or “farmhouse”), or invalid zip codes, etc.

5. Address fields with numerous derivations of street style (Ave, Rd, St, Ln, Cir, etc.) or apartment designations;

6. Name and address fields with highly non-standard formatting (i.e., misspellings, ampersands, spaces after hyphens, random apostrophes, zeroes in place of the letter “o”, commas in the middle of a name, etc.)

Regarding zip code, NRG Retail said that it identified 130 zip codes in PECO's February 2015 ECL that are ineligible for service because: they were in Delaware; do not exist according to the U.S.P.S; they were not associated with a physical serviceable address (i.e., for PO Boxes). "In addition, while the inclusion of a property lot number may be U.S.P.S. compliant, customers typically do not know the lot number of their property and they certainly do not use it when providing their address. There is no way for any supplier to know this information and requiring a 100% match on it is unreasonable," NRG said.

"To reiterate, PECO requires a 100% character-for-character exact match – across four data fields – of data that is polluted with random or extraneous information, misspelled names, zeros where there should be 'Os', spacing irregularities, reversed addresses, etc., in order to obtain a customer's account number and submit an enrollment. With so many abnormalities with the underlying data, achieving an exact match to find a customer in PECO's LUT is nearly impossible," NRG said.

"It is ironic that PECO requires 100% character-for-character matching when PECO's own customer database is not even close to 100% correct/accurate," NRG said.

Until such time that the EDCs/NGDCs can demonstrate that their databases are 100% accurate (i.e., all customer names and street names spelled correctly and name fields are free of extraneous information/characters, extra spaces, and addresses that are U.S.P.S compliant), no EGS/NGS should be required to obtain a 100% character-for-character match on any search in order to obtain a customer's account number, NRG said. The EDC/NGDC LUTs should be enabled with wildcard searching to increase the likelihood of successfully finding a customer's account number, NRG said.

NRG's concerns were included in comments on the introduction of LUTs into the natural gas market, with NRG urging the PUC to prevent the same problems from occurring as natural gas utilities implement the tools.

Docket No. M-2015-2468991

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