Privacy & Complaints

How to make a complaint:

To raise an official complaint with The Imperial Group  you must send an email explaining the complaint about The Imperial Group . All complaints are dealt with by a human and every complaint is treated separately so please include details such as the date and time that the negative experience occurred and which The Imperial Group  staff member/s you have dealt with.

Contact details needed to make the complaint:
Please forward over your email highlighting the complaint to contact@theimperial-group.com.

The complaint handling process:

Once a complaint Is received, we aim to deal with and resolve the issue right away. At first, all correspondence between ourselves and the person raising the complaint are investigated and reviewed. 

When the complaint has been investigated and verified, this will be raised to management. A verbal warning will be given to the The Imperial Group  employee at this point and a training session will be arranged to show how to deal with the situation better next time. 

If this is not the first time this has happened, a written warning or suspension will be issued depending on the severity of the issue.

A full apology will be given to the customer by The Imperial Group  and any mistakes will be rectified where possible.

Throughout this, the person who has made the complaint will receive email correspondence providing details of how the complaint is being handled and to give them confidence that The Imperial Group  takes all complaints very seriously and wants to make sure that this does not happen again.

How soon do we aim to resolve your issue?

All complaints are aimed to be solved within two weeks. The maximum time a complaint will take to be resolved is eight weeks.

How to contact the Ombudsman:

• Name: Energy Ombudsman
• Website: www.energyombudsman.org
• Email: enquiry@energyombudsman.org
• Phone: 0330 440 1624 (Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm, and Saturday, 9am to 1pm)
• Post:
Energy Ombudsman
P.O. Box 966
Warrington, WA4 9DF

There is no cost to complain:

There is no additional cost to complain about our services to us, and there will never be any additional charges regardless of the time it takes to resolve the complaint.

Our commitment to our customers:

The Imperial Group  values every single one of our customers and our employees work hard to ensure a smooth process for every contract agreed. We work with 35 suppliers who offer 1000s of different tariffs and The Imperial Group  will only offer contacts that we believe are a suitable fit for our customers. If a mistake is made on our end that costs our customer, as a good will gesture we will send a giftcard to the customer and a written apology to help rectify the issue.

PRIVACY POLICY

In compliance with UK and European data protection regulations, this privacy policy explains what personal information we collect from you when you are a recipient of our services.

The Imperial Group  is committed to processing any personal data or information about its staff, contractors, partners, clients, and potential clients in ways that comply with its legal and regulatory obligations, and to being clear about what it does with their personal information.

This Privacy Policy provides an explanation as to what happens to any personal data that you provide to us, or that we collect from you.

We do update this Policy from time to time so please do review this policy regularly

About personal data that is collected:

The Imperial Group  are a broker of electricity, gas, water and merchant services for businesses. The Imperial Group  mainly targets the SME market. We provide a full breakdown of the prices available in each market and assist all our clients in the set up or transfer of their various utility supplies.

The data we collect to provide these services is taken from business or non-personal individuals when possible and will be processed for business purposes as a data processor. In some cases when dealing with Sole Traders or Partnerships more personal details are needed so we are committed to keeping this data safe under personal data regulations.

The Imperial Group  receives data or personal information from the following:

When you enquire to use our services through our staff or from one of our referring partners

When you enquire to use our services through one of our referring partners
When you are a recipient of our services
When you apply to join or work for The Imperial Group

The types of information we may collect:

Your name
business name
address
contact telephone number
email address
Date of birth
Home address
Your existing utility supplier(s)
contract end date(s)
meter readings and consumption
electricity MPAN number(s)
Gas MPRN number(s)
Water SPID number(s)
credit or debit card details 
bank account details

The Imperial Group  record all inbound and outbound telephone calls. These recordings are often used to make sure we are providing the best service to our customers and some suppliers require this for us to be able to provide their services. This ensures only competitive offers are being made and can be referred to should a complaint arise.

Reasons why we collect this information:

To provide you with utility comparisons
to provide information other services which may interest you
for our legitimate interests in ensuring that our clients are not paying more than they should be for a service we provide
to meet all legal requirements as an employer 
to meet all requirements for the suppliers we work with
for safeguarding and health and safety of The Imperial Group  employees

How we collect business and personal information:

directly from you when you request prices from our website
From recorded inbound or outbound telephone calls
from our referring partners
from publicly available sources
from industry specialists such as as ECOES
From existing suppliers when permission is given from the client to do this on their behalf
directly from The Imperial Group  employees


The Imperial Group  are committed to keeping your information up to date. If you believe that we have made an error, then please contact us as we have outlined below, and we will use reasonable endeavours to correct.

Keeping your information safe and secure:

We are committed to ensuring that your personal information is secure and protecting it from being inappropriately or accidentally accessed, used, shared, or destroyed, and against it being lost.

To prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online and in paper form. We only provide access to your data to staff who require access.

Sharing your data with Third parties:

Access to your personal information is only allowed when required by the law or is required as part our fulfilling our service obligations.  We do not, and will never, sell your personal information with other third parties.

As a broker of electricity, gas, water, merchant services and supply for businesses when you become a client we will need to share your details with your new energy /utility provider as part of our contracted arrangements.

For our general day to day data processing activities, we use the following to help us administer and monitor the services we provide:

for database management of our clients, staff and office admin
for payroll and financial accounting
to share newsletters, promotional detail, industry news or other information that maybe of interest to you
to help us improve our services and database
for credit checking and verification of client applications
for the administration of our website and customer interactions with The Imperial Group
for any legal guidance in the provision of our services

For full details of the third party suppliers we use please contact us at contact@theimperial-group.com

How long do we keep personal information?

We will only keep your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

In general terms we will retain the data of our clients for the duration of the services provided under contract

For ex clients or businesses that have not or yet to subscribe to our services we will retain your data in line with any known utility contract expiry dates or up to a maximum of 60 months (representing the maximum utility supply contract)

For anyone who applies or enquires about joining the The Imperial Group  but does not work for us we will hold your details for a maximum of 6 months

For our staff the records are held in line with HMRC requirements for up to 6 years after you leave us

For full details please contact contact@theimperial-group.com for a copy of our Retention Policy

Marketing & Market Research:

The Imperial Group  undertake a range of marketing activity using the data held within our database. This includes:

Maintaining regular contact with our clients and prospect clients to keep them advised of industry news
To share our newsletter or other promotional information
We make use of Social media channels such as Facebook, Linked In and Twitter for business promotion

We may also make unsolicited approaches and calling to new potential contacts or business clients, using prospect information held within our records or using information drawn from publicly-available sources. These approaches are made in a fully complaint manner as governed by PECR (the Privacy of Electronic Communications Regulation), with the contacts being given the option to opt out from such contact

We may have acquired your data from a data broker; where possible we will notify you that we are holding your data and how this will be used as expected of us as data controller

Any changes to our marketing activities will be updated in this policy and we will ensure that the activity we undertake will be compliant with UK and European data protection regulations.

Controlling your personal information:

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. If you believe that any information we are holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please write to or email us as soon as possible. We will promptly correct any information found to be incorrect.

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under UK Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR) in relation to your personal information. You may have the right to:

Access information held about you, your right of access can be exercised in accordance with data protection law;
object to us processing, or ask us to restrict our processing of your personal information for any of the purposes listed in this policy, at any time.
ask us to update and correct any out-of-date or incorrect personal information that we hold about you free of charge.
ask us to erase or delete your personal information (in certain circumstances). We will do our best to respond to such requests, but these are subject to certain limitations such as legal requirements

Request a transfer of your personal information (in certain circumstances).

If you wish to exercise any of the above rights or to review, verify, correct or question anything detailed in this policy or are unhappy with any aspect of how we use your data please contact us at: contact@theimperial-group.com