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Leading multi-utility provider Altogether Group is evolving their community support plan to put the pulse back into strata communities in South East Queensland. They aim to do this by helping strata managers and committees to attract retail or commercial tenants by offering free electricity for a limited time.
“We understand that many communities have heightened vacancy rates due to the impact of border closures and COVID restrictions. It has been an incredibly tough time, and hopefully we are turning the corner,” says Terry Leckie, CEO of Altogether Group. “With borders now open, everyone is getting ready for a seasonal re-birth. Retailers are ready to trade and are searching for the perfect lease. Our goal is to support our communities by helping them to shape the perfect leasing deals.”
“That’s why we have evolved our support plan to now include three months electricity use to new retail tenants within communities that we supply.” continued Mr Leckie.
Through local utility services, Altogether Group is currently providing electricity, gas, hot water and potable water embedded network services to over 30,000 customers through their local teams in Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sydney, with a vision is to increase this to 100,000 within the next three years.
Altogether Group’s COVID recovery plan will be available until 30 April 2022. To be eligible, strata communities must be:
Altogether agency clients are also eligible by engaging Altogether before 30 May 2022 (Full terms and conditions are available here
Drew McKillican, Executive Manager of Energy Services at Altogether Group, says the recovery plan is a natural extension of Altogether’s market leading Community Support Program that was established in March 2020 when the pandemic was beginning to take hold.
“True customer support is part of our core values and we believe that has been strongly demonstrated over the past two years through our pandemic response and Community Support Program. In March 2020 we wrote to the Australian Energy Retailer to inform them that, with immediate effect, we had ceased all debt collection and frozen all prices to ensure we could continue to provide services for our customers who were under financial pressure due to the pandemic,” says Mr McKillican.
Rather than delaying assistance until a full policy had been formed, Altogether acted immediately by suspending debts, disconnection and collections activity. They also wrote to all clients and customers to inform them of their collections suspension, in spite of the risk to the company, in order to provide comfort during difficult times.
“Although public movement towards supporting those affected by COVID-19 hadn’t yet been talked about, we understood the impact on our customers and the need to act quickly. In fact, we were the only retailer to set out such a pathway to assist customers immediately and the resulting Customer Support Program has remained in place until now. It will now be superseded by our new recovery program that we hope will stimulate retail leases in strata communities and continue to provide much needed assistance,” continued Mr McKillican.
Andi Lopez, Account Manager and Customer Service Advocate at Altogether Group, has seen the impact of the program first-hand. “It was truly rewarding to be able to assist so many of our customers who were genuinely struggling under the burden of losing their jobs or family members not able to work. It is great to see the program evolve in this way and to continue our support.”
CEO Terry Leckie says Altogether will continue to support as the pandemic enters the next phase and deliver value to its customers in 2022.
““The pandemic has not dulled our creativity. We are on target for a better and brighter 2022 with some improvements in how we deliver energy education, software updates and more infrastructure investments for the benefit of our clients. We will continue to innovate to support our customers in the coming year and look forward to seeing them face-to-face again too.”
