Smart meters help reduce any billing issues and can also help in keeping your credit ratings good. This statement is not debatable. The benefits of smart meters have been identified as huge and this is why the United Kingdom government has vouched to have smart meters installed in all the homes by 2020!
How do the smart meters help in reducing the issues related to the bills? Consider the situation where you have normal electricity or gas non-smart meters installed. Assume that you have a quarterly billing facility available. This means that your bill gets generated every three months. You expect that a meter operator would come around to read the meter which is installed outside the property. But if you have talked to your utility service provider earlier about this, you will be surprised to know that most of the times the meter operators do not visit the property and taking the non-smart meters' reading as a routine is more a responsibility of the consumer.
Many times the consumers forget or are unaware of the fact that they have to provide the non-smart meters' readings for an accurate bill. Once every three months, if the bill is assessed due to estimation for the lack of an actual meter reading, then the bill amount might differ vastly than the customer would have expected. This would lead to billing disputes and in cases where the customer is not able to reach the non-smart meters' location, take a lot of time to resolve.
This issue can be effectively be resolved by the installation of smart meters at the property. These smart meters automatically send the reading to the supplier and the customer always invariably receives the correct bill every time. There are many utility companies which are linked with credit agencies. This means that if a utility bill is not paid in time, then the customer's credit scores get affected. This happens a lot of times when there is a billing dispute regarding the meter reads. With the smart meters eliminating the meter reading issue, the customers will pay in time and hence their credit ratings will stand good.
Consider the other situation where a consumer has just paid a winter bill and the next summer bill is estimated on the winter consumption. More often than not, the customers blame the utility companies for incompetence for not having read the non-smart meters properly. This is also one of the major causes of the customers changing utility brands. Late final payments in these cases have been a major source of credit scores being affected adversely. The smart meters help eliminate that problem as well. With the last day of supply being made available, the bill can be assessed accurately for that date and even though the customer might have left the property earlier, the final bill is generated spot on.The smart meters therefore eliminate bill and meter reading related issues and therefore customers are persuaded to pay their bills in time. This is a positive both for the customers and the utility companies as the revenue inflow becomes more efficient and on the other hand, thesmart meters indirectly help maintain the customer's credit scores.