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FAQ

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) help customers find more information about company services and how products work.

Energy4 is here to help business customers. Due to many FAQs information requests being asked by Business customers, Energy4 has formulated the following Frequently Asked Questions page to assist business customers further.

Please review our Frequently Asked Questions information  below. Please contact Energy4 by Telephone 01256643634 – South Office & 01642888814 – North Office or by Email for further questions?

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, and an FAQ page on your website is an organized collection of valuable information that your customers ask about your products and services. This page is a useful way to organize information that your customers often ask. FAQ pages can offer lots of benefits, including:

Improve your customer’s experience.

Provide quick information to help customers make a purchasing decision.

Reduce the time your employees need to answer simple questions.

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My energy supplier is demanding large back dated payment Yes, Energy4 can help. Suppliers do not explain why this is occurring. We are very experienced in analysing and managing this type of situation. Often to a favourable resolution for our clients.  Sometimes energy suppliers make mistakes. We are experts at identifying any errors to provide you with independent checks.  With assistance we can confirm if the demand is valid. And then we assist with negotiating appropriate terms to settle the outstanding amount.  It’s much easier to begin negotiations to a successful outcome earlier in the process. So it’s best to contact us as soon as you’re aware of any issue. What are the back-billing rules? You can’t be charged for gas or electricity used more than 12 months ago if you have not been correctly billed for it before. Suppliers must make these terms clear in their contract terms and conditions. The rules apply to household and small business energy customers. They may not apply if you have behaved obstructively or unreasonably, preventing accurate billing. This could include: blocking meter readings at your property on more than one occasion stealing gas or electricity. If you get a back bill Contact your supplier if you get a bill for energy usage that’s for more than a year ago. Explain that you understand you are protected by the back-billing rules. You should only be charged for up to your last 12 months’ energy use if you haven’t had an accurate bill in over a year. To help, use this Citizens Advice back billing example letter. Make a complaint if your supplier continues to ask for the full amount. If you haven’t had an energy bill in over a year To help your supplier send you accurate bills, try to: provide regular meter readings tell them when you are moving in or out of a property. think about getting a smart meter. If you can’t pay a back bill If you think you can’t afford to pay, ask your supplier about repayment plan options. They must take into account how much you can afford. They will explain your options. Citizens Advice can also help if you can’t agree on a payment plan or if you’re not happy with the options the supplier has given to you. Call OfGem on 0808 223 1133 or use their online webchat. For textphone contact OfGem on dial 18001 followed by the helpline number. Mistakes are surprisingly common in energy bills, with Ofgem having issued £53 million in fines to the big six suppliers for bad billing practices. And when your supplier sends out the wrong bill, back billing is one way to make up the difference. Here’s what you need to know.

In this guide you’ll find information relating to:

  • What is back billing?

  • Back billing scenarios – why does back billing happen?

  • What are Ofgem’s back billing rules?

  • Back billing rules: FAQ

What is back billing? Back billing happens when an energy company hasn’t billed you correctly in the past for the energy you have used and then sends you a back-bill – also known as a back-dated bill – to recover the outstanding amount. Back-bills include all missed or underpaid charges for the relevant period. Unfortunately, these missing payments can really add up over time and suddenly lead to a high electric or gas bill. The average back-bill is £1,160 – which is a huge sum, especially when it’s unexpected – and it’s not uncommon for back-bills to run into many thousands of pounds. This is why you should always get in touch with your energy supplier immediately if you think that your bill is incorrect. Mistakes are surprisingly common in energy bills: Ofgem has issued over £20 million in fines to energy suppliers for faults that included billing problems over the last eight years. Fortunately, strict back billing rules have been introduced to regulate when back-dated bills are permitted. Back billing scenarios – why does back billing happen? The most common reasons for back-dated bills are as follows: Incorrect meter ID numbers: If the supplier has the wrong ID number in its records for your gas or electricity meter, you might end up paying for someone else’s energy. In some cases, this can result in an underpayment, which if left undetected could lead to a hefty back-bill in the future. Estimated meter readings: Many UK households use estimated meter readings as the basis of their bills, which can lead to either underpaying or overpaying throughout the year. If accurate readings aren’t periodically taken, long-term underpayment could occur, which could result in a back billing situation. Human error: One-off mistakes are probably the most common reason for back billing. Small slip-ups – like accidentally cancelling a Direct Debit – can cause the energy charges to pile up over several months before any discrepancy is noticed. When the missing amount is spotted, the energy supplier is likely to hit the customer with a back-bill for several months’ worth of payments. Faulty gas or electric meters: Suppliers are required to inspect meters every two years, but if you see a big change in your meter readings in the interim that can’t be explained by other circumstances, such as a mild winter or fewer occupants in the home, then it’s worth alerting your supplier in case you have a faulty gas or electricity meter. If your electricity or gas meter is faulty and you’ve been under-billed as a result, you will be responsible for paying for the outstanding amount. What are Ofgem’s back billing rules? In 2007, Ofgem put back billing rules into effect to prevent energy companies from trying to claw back debts that had accrued over a significant length of time. The Ofgem Back billing Principle states that an energy supplier does not have the right to seek payment for energy used over 12 months ago if you haven’t been correctly billed for it. There are many reasons why you might not have received a bill for the missing amount. These are some of the most common ones: You requested bills from your energy supplier, but they were never issued. An incorrect bill was issued due to a mix-up in meter reading information, and the energy supplier failed to correct the bill despite being notified of the error. You were billed using estimated meter readings rather than real readings taken by a professional meter reader or a member of your household. You reported issues with your meter or account, but your supplier didn’t resolve them. Your supplier didn’t respond promptly to problems with your method of payment. There are a few circumstances in which Ofgem’s back billing rules don’t apply. The regulator says that ‘if you have behaved obstructively or unreasonably, preventing accurate billing’ then you may not be covered. For instance, if you blocked meter readings being taken at your property on more than one occasion, you may still be liable for all energy used. The best way to prevent back billing is by ensuring that you receive accurate bills in the first place. Inform the supplier when you move in or out of a property and provide regular meter readings to reduce the chance of errors accumulating over time. Back billing rules: FAQ Here are a few common questions about the back billing rules and how they work. How long can an energy company back-date a bill? As stated in the back billing law, an energy supplier can only back-date a bill for 12 months. It can’t ask for payment for energy that was used over a year ago. These protections should be clearly explained in your energy supplier’s terms and conditions. What happens if you get a bill for energy that was used before you moved in? Contact your energy supplier to notify them of the issue immediately. Make sure you provide all relevant information, including the date you moved in. You should send a meter reading as soon as you take over any new property to ensure that you’re not charged for electricity or gas that you haven’t used. It’s also important to let your supplier know when you’re moving out so that they know who to bill for energy used in your previous residence. It will also give them the chance to set up gas and electricity in your new home if you’re not planning to switch your provider when you move. What should I do if my energy company isn’t following the back billing rules? There are clear procedures in place for handling back billing issues. Step 1: Contact your supplier When you receive a back-bill that you believe is incorrect, you should first contact the supplier and follow its complaints handling procedures. All energy suppliers will have an official process for complaints. Step 2: Contact Citizens Advice If speaking to your supplier doesn’t resolve the issue, contact Citizens Advice on 08454 04 05 06 who will advise you further. Step 3: Contact the Energy Ombudsman The final step is to contact the Energy Ombudsman for assistance and to make a formal complaint. This independent body investigates and mediates all back billing disputes on a case-by-case basis. When doesn’t the back billing code apply? In some cases, you will still be liable for a back-dated bill. The Ofgem Back billing Principle doesn’t apply in the following circumstances: You’ve deliberately avoided paying your bills. You moved into a new property and never contacted the energy supplier to arrange a new contract. You haven’t cooperated when asked to take meter readings or responded to requests for other meter details. The energy supplier has gone out of business. What happens if I can’t afford to pay my back-bill? If your back-dated bill is for energy used in the last 12 months, but it’s more than you can comfortably afford to pay, you should contact your energy supplier as soon as possible. Most electricity and gas companies understand that households often can’t afford to pay a large bill all at once and will set up payment plans to let you pay off your back-bill in instalments. In many cases, the supplier will agree to spread the bill over a similar period to the one over which the debt accumulated. For example, if your back-bill covers six months of underpayments, your energy company may offer you six months to pay them back. How can I prevent back billing? While some mistakes are out of your hands, the best way to avoid back billing is to do everything in your power to make sure your bills are accurate when you receive them. Start by taking regular meter readings. If the numbers seem way off one month in comparison to your usual amounts, you could have a faulty gas or electric meter. You can have this checked by asking your energy company to send an engineer to check your meter. It’s also a good idea to check the identifying information on your bill is correct each month, including your name, address and meter ID numbers. Something as minor as a misspelling could lead to billing errors, so it’s worth reporting any errors you spot straight away. Thankfully, as smart meters are rolled out across the country, back billing should become less common as suppliers automatically receive real-time meter readings and customers find it easier to monitor their own usage. Contact Energy4 today for further information Opening Hours: 8:00 – 17:00 Mon to Sat To discuss further, please contact Energy4 Telephone: Call us on 01642 888814 Email: contact@energy4.co.uk Please provide the best date and time of day that we should contact you Click here to contact Energy4 today Contact Energy4 today for further information Further information My energy supplier is demanding large back dated payment My energy supplier is demanding large back dated payment  My energy supplier is demanding large back dated payment  My energy supplier is demanding large back dated payment  My energy supplier is demanding large back dated payment  My energy supplier is demanding large back dated payment My energy supplier is demanding large back dated payment  business electricity business gas

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    What Is A FAQ Page?

    A great FAQ page is one of the most important elements of your business website. While your company needs to have great content and clean architecture to provide a great user experience. Your site FAQ section will draw most of your traffic and convert more customers.

    FAQ pages are an integral part of good navigation and the customer journey for most websites. This section of your site is the go-to area for your audience who want to learn more about your business and find out why your products and services are what they want.

    Whenever someone clicks on the FAQ page you know, they in your business. For many people, the website FAQ page is the second page they go to after the Home or Services pages. Instead of guessing what topics you should cover, you can use several online marketing tools for small business to help you understand the needs of your customers. This is a great way to optimize your Frequency Asked Questions page before spending a lot of time or resources on the task.

    For many people, the website FAQ page is the second page they go to after the Home or Services pages. Your FAQ section needs to include high-quality content that will help your customers understand your products and services quickly.

    This means that your FAQ page can play a central role in driving your audience to paying customers. It is a good idea to invest in high-quality content for your FAQ page to ensure that your content converts and helps your business reach your goals.

    Along with the technical questions and answers, your FAQ section will establish you as an authority in your industry. The FAQ page shows that you know so much about your products and services that you can answer questions before they are even asked! 

    You can also use your FAQ page as a form of social proof because your business can establish your website as a valuable asset to drive sales.

    Finally, your website Frequency Asked Questions page will reduce a lot of stress from your customer service department. Instead of fielding a large volume of accessible to answer questions. Your business should promote your FAQ page to your clients as their go-to source of information about your business.

     

    Could You Use An Extra 1,377 Monthly Visitors?

    Wondering how an FAQ page can help your company? Check out the full case study to see how our website copywriting & content marketing helped Export Solutions today!

     

    The Main Benefits Of Your FAQ Page Explained

    Along with being a central location of your website, your visitors will go to your FAQ page if they want to learn more about your products and offerings.

    Since your Frequency Asked Questions section will be the highlight of your website, you should link to product pages from the FAQ page. This will help your internal linking strategy and spread the benefits of a great SEO strategy to other areas of your website.

     

    1. Your FAQ Help You Address Your Reader’s Needs

    If you want to increase the usability of your site, improve your business authority, and increase conversions, then you need to have an excellent FAQ section. Think of your FAQ page as the main hub that your customers can go to with their questions.

     

    One of the strongest reasons to have a FAQ section is to address the needs of your readers. Since your customers that they want more information about your products and services by going to your FAQ page. You should provide high-quality content about your business on the FAQ page.

    The best thing you can do to overcome objections and increase sales is to provide accurate information to address questions your customers might be asking. Instead of allowing uncertainty to prevent a sale, you can use their items as fuel to establish your business as an industry leader and drive more conversions.

     

    2. Establish Your Business As An Expert

    Whenever you ask someone a question, you are seeking their advice because you view them as experts This same thing occurs when your customers ask you questions about your product and services. Since your customers want to know information about issues that your business knows about, you can use your FAQ section as a way to establish your business as a trusted expert.

    Whenever your audience asks you questions about your business, you can establish yourself as an expert by answering their questions with great information.

    Your competition is working to draw your customers to them, so you should do everything you can to establish yourself as a trusted expert. Providing excellent answers to the questions your customers are asking is the best way for you to be a reliable source.

    Use your FAQ section to help your business earn the trust of your customers. You can use your FAQ section as the first touchpoint with your customers where you can direct your customers to begin the relationship that will convert them into paying customers.

     

    3. Improve Your Sales

    If your business has an optimized FAQ section on your website, then you will see an increase in conversions since the percentage of visitors on your website will buy your products and services.

    However, having an FAQ page with miscellaneous information won’t do the trick.

    Your FAQ page needs to be tailored to the specific needs of your customers. In addition to having focused content, you should have links from your FAQ page to your product pages and online shop.

    More advanced tactics for a FAQ page is to compare your products and services to those of your competition. This will give you a natural way to show the advantages of your business compared to your competition.

     

    4. Boost Your Search Engine Optimization

    Search engines love FAQ pages because they provide relevant content to help Google understand your business.

    This means that you need lots of good content to help your business get found in search engines. Your website’s FAQ page is the perfect place to publish lots of interesting information about your business, products, and services.

    You can also leverage your FAQ page to include long-tail keywords that your customers are searching for. Since you are already providing information about your business, you can add keyword-rich content so when someone searches for your products and services they will find your FAQ page.

    The questions and answers you include on your FAQ page will on the user personas that you have to build to represent your customers. As you continue to develop more answers for this section, you will find this page will rank high in search engines.

    This is why you should include specific and detailed questions on your FAQ page. This section should contain relevant information about your business so you can get picked up in search engines like Google and Bing.

     

    A Few Tips For Writing Your FAQ Page

    To write a great FAQ page, you will need to know what your customers are asking most often. You should think about whether your clients ask about individual features and unsure about some technical aspects of your products and services.

    If your clients ask about your features, then you can provide accurate answers in your FAQ section and build out that information on the product pages.

    Your FAQ page should complement information that exists elsewhere on your site. This approach will help your website rank for that information, and save you time producing the FAQ page since the content exists on your product pages.

     

    Your Boring Content Is Losing You

    Need website content on a budget? We deliver the copywriting you want at a price you can afford!

    Since your visitors will be consuming your content on different devices and in specific ways you need to create your FAQ section to be displayed in various forms. Here are some ideas to help you write compelling FAQ content that can also be scanned and answers found.

    Put yourself in your customer’s shoes to figure out what questions or problems they might experience. Provide in-depth and valuable solutions to these issues.

    Your answers to the FAQs should be informative to give insight about your business, the products and services, and always point back to benefits and value. Be concise enough to offer information that is necessary but doesn’t be too wordy because you don’t want to lose your customers as they are asking questions about your company.

    Format your content for easy consumption as needed. Your content should be easy to scan. You can use bullet points and short paragraphs to help your readers consume your content.

    Be sure to double-check your information. Your FAQ sections need to be accurate especially if you are writing about technical topics.

    Organize your questions and answers in similar groups. Your customers want to find answers.

     

    How We Build A Great FAQ Page For Our Clients

    We have already discussed why an FAQ page is important for your website, but I think it’s important to look at how you can build an FAQ page that gets you found in search engines and drives qualified leads.

    One of the first things to remember when building an FAQ page is that you are trying to provide answers to specific questions that your customers have. Your answers should be educational in nature, but you should also make your answers lean towards getting your customers to engage with you and convert. This is in their best interest, and you can encourage them to interact with you by providing the answers they are looking for and setting yourself up as an authority in the market.

    We did this exact thing for Export Solutions with their Import & Export Compliance FAQ page. Prior to our updates, this FAQ page was bare bones and not very helpful to readers. This resulted in low Impressions and nearly zero clicks- neither are good for their business. We took a thorough approach to update the page and here are some elements that we considered when building the page:

    We used real questions. Our team looked through contact forms and listened to voicemail messages from actual customers to find out what people were asking about different aspects of trade compliance. In addition to listening to customers, we also used different tools to find other questions that mattered to Export Solutions customers.

    We categorized questions into groups. After we got done scouring contact forms and listening to dozens of voicemails, we set out to organize the questions into five large groups. Each of these groups contained questions related to the main topic, and each group of questions relating to a service that Export Solutions offers.

    We sent the questions to experts for answers. We are not experts in trade consulting, so we sent the questions with direction to the team at Export Solutions. We asked their team to provide a 150-200 word response to each question. This part of the process ensured that the FAQ uses correct information to address customer questions.

    We added an intro to each FAQ section. We wanted to help the content get found in search engines so we added a 1-2 paragraph intro to each FAQ section. This information provides general insight to what each section will cover, why it is important, and who the answers are fo.

    We added links to blog posts and service pages. We knew that the FAQ page will get lots of traffic, so we wanted to extend the value of the FAQ page for Export Solutions. To do this we added a link to relevant blog posts and service pages when appropriate. Doing this improved the flow of information throughout the site, and these links provided the customer with a way to learn more about the topic and reach out to the Export Solutions team.

    Add lots of CTAs throughout the page. Since the FAQ page will get lots of traffic from customers seeking specific answers, we wanted to give customers a great reason to reach out to the Export Solutions team. We added several CTA buttons and forms on the page to attract clicks and engagement.

    Improve Your Website With A Great FAQ Page

    Many businesses bury their FAQ section at the bottom of their website, and this makes it difficult to for your customers to find. If your audience can’t find your FAQ page, then they can’t find the answers they want to make a sale from your website.

    Since the FAQ page is also an excellent way to rank in search engines your business needs to ensure you use long-tail keywords and real-life questions to draw qualified leads. Not only will this help Google find your content, but it will also establish you as a leader in your industry.

    This new level of trust will contribute to drive your audience towards a purchase and help you reach your sales goals!

    If you are ready to drive more online sales with a professional website copywriter, then shoot me an email today! I will work with you to understand your audience and write compelling copy that will get your business more online sales!

    Further information

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