The last time we served retail Texas electricity was three years ago in October 2018 after exiting our previous electricity company. This hiatus gave us the opportunity to look back upon what allowed us to have one of the highest growth rates and lowest churn rates the retail electricity industry has seen in Texas – and be recognized multiple times as one of the fastest growing retail energy companies in the country.
For the first time in a very long time, we became electricity shoppers. What we found was astonishing – almost all the retail electricity providers in the state have moved away from what an electricity company (actually, any company) should be all about – the customer!
We found larger companies spending millions of dollars to convince customers that “free weekends and nights, half-off summer and winter” and other gimmicky plans were the way to go – all the while fervently hoping that the customers wouldn’t find out that they would eventually be paying extremely high rates. We also found companies that would use risqué language on billboards and “hip and cool” digital advertising to convince customers that the way to go was take on the wholesale power risks themselves (and we all know how that ended).
We also realized that companies didn’t really want to provide customer service. The fancy apps and the chat bots they wanted us to use weren’t for our benefit – they were intended to take the place of real live humans to help the customer with their problems. The focus was clearly on cost control rather than customer satisfaction.
And when our contracts expired, we were in for another shock – the renewal offers we got from our providers were higher than the rates they charged on their website – a case of punishing customers for their loyalty instead of rewarding them! Then, when we didn’t renew at the ridiculous rates, the same companies (the ones that didn't want us to call when we had questions as a customer) started calling three times a day to get us to renew our plans.
All of this gave us the answer to the question that we were hoping to answer -“What should Value Power look like?” It was quite simple really when we thought about it: it should look like what we would want our own electric provider to look like – it should look like what our previous company looked like, the one where our pricing was simple, the one where we rewarded customers for loyalty, and we answered the phone when the customer called, the one where we won multiple customer service awards!
So here we are – Value Power!
We hope you will trust this team with your Texas electricity needs as more than half a million customers have done over the years.
The Value Power Management Team