The Department issued a letter to competitive electric suppliers regarding a deceptive telemarketing campaign. As described in the letter, calls are being made to residential electric consumers as follows:

"calls begin with a pre-recorded message that states that, as a customer of the specified electric distribution company (i.e., Eversource, National Grid, Unitil), the consumer is eligible to receive a 30 percent discount from his/her current monthly electric bill. In some instances, the automated message states that the consumer has been overcharged on previous bills. The pre-recorded message call informs the consumer to “press 1” to find out more about the offer, at which point the consumer is transferred to a live agent. At no point during the message is the name of the competitive supplier identified. The live agent subsequently informs the consumer that, by switching to the unidentified competitive supplier, the consumer can avoid paying charges mandated by statute (e.g., customer, transmission, and renewable energy charges that currently appear on the monthly bill)."

In order to identify the supplier or suppliers on whose behalf the calls are being made, the Department directed all competitive suppliers that have conducted telemarketing campaigns during 2020 to provide the following information:

"1) the name of each third-party vendor that conducted telemarketing on behalf of the competitive supplier during 2020, and for each vendor, all subcontractors that the vendor may have employed for the purpose of such telemarketing; and
2) a statement that the competitive supplier has contacted each of the vendors identified in (1), and that the vendor attested to the supplier that neither the vendor nor any subcontractors engaged in the types of telemarketing calls described above."

Responses are due March 13, 2020. The Department noted that a supplier is responsible for the actions of its third party marketing vendors. The full text of the Department Letter is available on the NEM Website.

NEM filed comments on the Tier One initiatives that were proposed for stakeholder consideration in the Department's retail market investigation. The Tier One initiatives pertain to competitive supplier license application review, marketing-related activities, automatic renewal, competitive supplier enrollment reports and the Energy Switch website.

While largely supporting the proposals, NEM suggested a number of modifications and clarifications. Regarding the license review process, NEM recommended that suppliers be given a mechanism to respond to comments received on their applications and that comments be limited to matters germane to the application. The Department proposed a daily notification of door-to-door marketing activity, limited to three municipalities per notice. NEM suggested that suppliers provide two days advance notice that identifies a start and end date for marketing in a particular area, with such notice spanning a week duration. With regards to the proposal to require competitive suppliers to record telemarketing calls in addition to third party verification calls, NEM requested clarification with respect to the telemarketing call record retention policy, particularly regarding how long the records would need to be retained and distinguishing between telemarketing calls that result in an enrollment and those calls that do not.

NEM supported the adoption of a contract summary form for supplier use. NEM also supported the proposal that automatic renewal notifications be provided between thirty and sixty days prior to the expiration of contracts that have such provisions using a proposed automatic renewal notification template.

The full text of NEM's Comments is available on the NEM Website.