What are the Consumer Care Obligations?
The Consumer Care Obligations are a set of rules from New Zealand’s Electricity Authority that define how electricity retailers and distributors must look after consumers. They became mandatory on 1 January 2025, replacing the earlier voluntary Consumer Care Guidelines, and sit in Part 11A of the Electricity Industry Participation Code.
The obligations cover how consumers are treated across the relationship with their electricity providers, with particular focus on two groups:
- Medically dependent consumers, who rely on electricity for medical equipment where loss of supply could put their health at risk.
- Vulnerable consumers, whose circumstances make them more likely to be harmed, for example by payment difficulty or disconnection.
This page gives a general overview, not legal advice. The Electricity Authority publishes the obligations and guidance, and retailers and distributors should check the current text for their specific requirements.
Who they apply to
The obligations apply to electricity retailers and electricity distributors (lines companies). Their responsibilities differ:
- Retailers hold most of the customer relationship, so many obligations relate to areas such as communication, payment difficulty, disconnection and medically dependent status.
- Distributors own the network and are responsible for faults and planned and unplanned outages, so their obligations connect to that role, including how they treat medically dependent consumers.
Because retailers and distributors both deal with the same consumers, the obligations also depend on information being shared between them.
Why they matter to the contact centre
A large share of consumer care happens on the phone, by email or in chat. The contact centre is often where:
- a consumer first mentions health needs, financial difficulty or other vulnerability
- a consumer asks about medically dependent status
- a medically dependent consumer rings the fault line during an outage
- a customer in payment difficulty asks for help
If the contact centre doesn’t recognise the situation, record it properly or follow the agreed process, the organisation may not meet its obligations, and the consumer may not get the support they need.
What good contact centre practice looks like
- Clear processes and scripts. Use call scripting and knowledge articles so every agent, including after-hours and surge staff, knows how to identify and respond to medically dependent and vulnerable consumers.
- Training on recognising vulnerability. Agents learn the cues and how to ask sensitive questions respectfully.
- Priority routing. During outages, build vulnerability into fault triage and make sure automation hands these callers to a person.
- Accurate records. Capture what the consumer told you and what was done, with appropriate privacy protections for health information.
- Quality assurance and evidence. Use quality assurance, call recording and analytics to check processes are followed and to show how consumers were treated.
- Information sharing. Agree how the contact centre passes relevant information between retailer and distributor systems.
- Review and improve. Use complaints, call themes and audit findings to improve scripts and training.
The Australian comparison
Australia has a different framework. The National Energy Retail Rules include life support obligations for retailers and distributors and hardship requirements for retailers, with Victoria operating its own equivalent rules. The principles are similar, but the detail is not interchangeable.