ARMS Ltd: 2,000 complaints per day

More than 10,000 families have not received allowances due to discrepancies in the cheques that were sent.

Sean Barbara, Policy and Strategy manager of ARMS Ltd blamed the new computerised system being used to compute bills for the inefficiencies which have resulted in the huge queues at the ARMS Ltd customer care centre.

Problems arose when bills were in the name of persons who had died where transferring of the bills never occurred, changes in the number of persons registered on the bill and changes of addresses or other details of clients whose name the bill was in.

Barbara said that cheques will be issued to the families who did not receive the energy allowance in the coming days.

Barbara said ARMS Ltd was dealing with approximately 1,500 inquiries per day in the form of personal meetings, telephone calls and emails. Most of these required further information about bills received, payment of bills or transferring bills to another name.

After the issue of the energy allowance inquiries rose to 2,000 per day. These were mostly from people wishing to transfer bills to another name or to change the number of persons registered on the bills.

To cope with the increased amount of people seeking help form ARMS Ltd, front-office employees were increased, opening hours extended, ‘fast lane tracks’ were opened for people with small problems, ‘service lanes’ were increased and a new waiting area was set up.

Barbara claims that traffic has gone back to normal over the past few days.

ARMS Ltd will be opening a new customer care centre in Blata l-Bajda, a more central area than their present office in Luqa, to accommodate clients, especially the elderly who have complained of difficulty in getting to the centre. However it is unlikely that this will be opened before the beginning of next year.