Protecting 18,000 Vulnerable Households Before Debt Collection Contact

Overview

Prepayment meter customers, typically households managing energy costs week to week, are among the most financially vulnerable households in the UK energy market. When a warrant is executed against the wrong account, the customer on the receiving end bears the consequences. Tightened Ofgem (the UK energy regulator) requirements following an industry-wide prepayment meter compliance failure made this a sector-wide accountability question.

A leading UK energy supplier engaged Pastdue Credit Solutions (PDCS), a Firstsource company, to run the welfare checks that sit upstream of any warrant or prepayment meter action. The energy supplier initiates the warrant process; PDCS is the checkpoint that determines whether any account is eligible to proceed.

What began as a warrants execution function is now a specialist Welfare operation, built to ensure no customer reaches a warrant or debt collection contact without the right checks in place.

Challenges

The shift from warrants execution to welfare governance required structural change under regulatory pressure, with PDCS carrying full compliance accountability and no equivalent welfare team at the energy supplier to fall back on.

• Consistent safeguarding across every call: Strengthened Ofgem requirements introduced mandatory checks across vulnerability assessment, prepayment suitability, and ability-to-pay verification. Embedding these consistently into call handling, across a team of varying experience levels, required both structural redesign and sustained quality management.
• Regulatory transition at pace: The industry-wide suspension of prepayment meter installs required PDCS to rebuild the engagement model from the ground up when activity resumed, with significantly stronger Ofgem compliance obligations and no room for a phased adjustment period.
• No internal equivalent: The energy supplier had no internal team performing the same welfare and warrants function. PDCS carried full accountability for compliance governance, with no parallel operations at the energy supplier to act as a backstop if standards slipped.
• Consistent safeguarding across every call: Strengthened Ofgem requirements introduced mandatory checks across vulnerability assessment, prepayment suitability, and ability-to-pay verification. Embedding these consistently into call handling, across a team of varying experience levels, required both structural redesign and sustained quality management.
• Quality during rapid expansion: Onboarding 10 new agents throughout 2025, while maintaining high audit scores against a 97% QA target, created sustained pressure on team managers and the training infrastructure supporting them.
• Service continuity under scaling pressure: Maintaining speed-of-answer and handle rates while absorbing significant team growth, knowledge transfer, and a change to the IVR call queue structure required operational flexibility across a compressed timeline.
• Ineligible accounts reaching the queue: Without a systematic pre-contact screening process, accounts belonging to households ineligible for warrant or meter action risked proceeding to customer contact. The consequences of that failure, for both the customer and the energy supplier's compliance position, made preventing it a non-negotiable part of the operating model.

How We Made it Happen

The operating model starts from a single principle: every customer in this function receives a full assessment before any action is taken.

• Welfare model rebuild: Restructured from a warrants execution function into a formal welfare operation, embedding safeguarding and eligibility checks into every call.
• Pre-contact account screening: During lower-volume periods, the team runs narrative checks to remove ineligible accounts before customer contact.
• Tiered quality governance: Weekly call audits and markdown analysis drive performance to a 97% target, with failed calls triggering immediate improvement plans.
• Training roadmap redesign: New agents progress through a speed-to-competency framework with ongoing coaching audits before live deployment.
• IVR queue restructure: A dedicated FCOM queue cut average hold time to under a minute, reducing dropped calls during peak demand.

Conclusion

Success in welfare operations is measured not only by compliance scores but by the vulnerable customers who never experience unnecessary debt collection action.

By identifying 18,000 unsuitable accounts before contact, PDCS protected customers while safeguarding the client's regulatory position.