The Minister of Power, Mr Rilwan Babalola has stated that the result of the evaluation of the services of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) by the SERVICOM Office  will help the organisation to improve its services and sit up to meet the yearnings of Nigerians who are their customers.

Speaking at the presentation of the report to the management of the Power Company at its headquarters in Abuja, the minister who was represented by the Director of Human Resources and administration in the Ministry, Hajia Shukuriya Salim Ali said the evaluation would help in the processes being put in place to achieve the target of generating 6000 megawatts of electricity in the country by the end of the year.
He advised the staff of the power company to see the report as a challenge and work to put the corporation on the right part. He asked the management to convey the shortcomings of all the zones to their respective stations to enable them commence implementation of recommendations even as he assured that the supervisory ministry would monitor the exercise.
Earlier, the Chief SERVICOM Officer, Dr (Mrs) Christiana Famro said the services of PHCN was rated one-star poor service. The lowest in the rating is starless shameful service which the company had scored in the first evaluation in 2006. This second evaluation was conducted in March this year. What this means is that the index of services provided by the PHCN has improved from what it used to be three years ago.
Famro said Nigerians would appreciate the unique problems facing PHCN if the workers were transparent in their dealings with the public and made available information to them on power outages, load shedding, cost of services, cards and meters. She said SERVICOM evaluators found out that the PHCN usually left the ‘people in the dark’ on how long they were going to be without power supply making their services unpredictable and erratic.
“You should be able to tell your customers that there would be power failure for whatever reason and give them information on when it would be restored. In your charter you pledged to provide electricity of adequate quality to all customers with an availability of at least 15 hours everyday, if for any reason you are not going to meet up with this, you should inform the people. ” she said.
The Chief SERVICOM Officer said the report further indicated that most people do not know the cost of services offered by the company like the prices of meters (Post and pre paid) and the billing system as many customers complained of incredulous bills. The situation is further compounded, according to her by lack of a systematic complains and grievance redress mechanism in many of the zonal offices.
In some of the zones, she observed, customers who pay for meters are not aware of how long it would take to take delivery whereas the company in its charter said it would deliver in less than a month.
On the issue of preferential treatment which requires areas around government houses across the country to have better power supply, Dr Famro said all Nigerians should be given equal treatment and where that is not the case, an explanation should be given earlier but not at the point of receiving service where the customer would feel short-changed by such actions.
She commended the Jos and Eko zones of PHCN for having a functional complaints procedure which ensures that complaints are tracked and analysed on monthly basis and called on the zones to copy such practice. The zones had common strengths in the area of using partners to improve their services and in some cases providing bulk metering services to some rural communities.
 The present evaluation exercise involved selected Zonal headquarters, business districts and customer care centres spread across the six geo-political zones of the country. PHCN has 11 distribution companies and six generation companies in the country.