British Gas Lite

British Gas Lite was launched as a "online only" energy service aimed at Small Businesses in 2018.

This is how British Gas Lite is described on its dedicated website:

"Created especially for small businesses, Lite is a fixed price energy service from British Gas. Lite costs less because we supply smart meters and we're entirely online. This means we can pass on savings to your business. With Lite, you can manage your energy use online – anytime, anywhere."

This is what Centrica said about the software platform in their press release:

"British Gas Lite partnered ENSEK to use their cloud-based retail energy platform, which enables feedback from customers and brokers to quickly turn into product enhancements and process improvements."

If the ~7 million residential customers of British Gas wanted to get an early insight into what being a customer on the new "digital first" billing platform* would be like, they could perhaps look no further than the Trustpilot page for British Gas Lite.

A further hint of what an "online only" service from British Gas entails can be seen in the responses posted by the company:

British Gas (Lite) appear so reluctant to talk to their customers, that they advise these business customers who have experienced poor service to contact them via Facebook or X for further support. Even a dead father gets you no special treatment:

We think that an "online only" energy brand – especially one aimed at businesses – should probably at least consider providing an email address.

* British Gas Lite was launched on Centrica and British Gas' new billing platform, powered by a software system originally called "Ignite" which is built by a company called ENSEK. The platform continued to evolve and was later known as the New Energy Platform (NEP) and launched to early residential customers under the brands British Gas X and then British Gas Evolve. At the time of writing (December 2024) British Gas' new system has been rolled out to approximately ~5.7 million of its ~7.5 million customers with the migration of remaining customers due to be "largely completed" by 2025.