If you get electricity from the CEB, the usual thing to do is to call them and lodge a complaint if there’s a breakdown. That is of course if the line is not busy and they actually answer the call. So you could imagine our surprise when we saw that the CEB had launched the CEB Care Mobile App. What did it have to offer? Well, that’s what we were about to find out.
Setting up the CEB Care Mobile App
The first thing that I noticed after launching the app was that it allowed users to register from within the app itself. Compared to the last app we reviewed, this was a welcome change. The registration process is simple. Just fill out details such as your name, email address and NIC number. You will also have to enter a unique username and password. Once that’s done, your account with the CEB Care Mobile App is successfully created. If you already have an account, you can go ahead and log in.
Once logged in, the home page of the CEB Care Mobile App highlights the facility to lodge a complaint about a power outage. New complaints can either be lodged by selecting an Electricity account or by picking a location from the map. From there, you can select the type of complaint. These range from simple power outages, to broken power lines, voltage flickering, high voltage and road accidents such as pole damage or trees falling on the power lines.
You can also attach an image in case of an accident or similar is taking place. In the event of a power cut, you could probably send a picture of how dark your house is. Once a complaint has been lodged, you would be notified of its’ progress.
Staying Ahead with the CEB Care Mobile App
In addition to lodging complaints, the CEB Care Mobile App also gives you a calendar list of dates of possible power outages. This is to make sure that you know when an outage would occur so that you can be prepared for it.
The CEB Care Mobile App also has a number of other interesting features. For starters, you can actually pay your electricity bill through the app. The payment goes through HNB’s payment gateway (at least it did so for us), and was quite fast.
The other feature we found interesting was a Bill Calculator. Using the calculator, you can find out the Fixed Charge, Total Charge and Charge for a day. You are required to enter the number of electricity units and also the start and end date as well. Or you can just pick it from a calendar. The calculator feature also allows calculation for areas such as domestic, religious, hotel, government, industrial, and many more.
If that calculation is too complicated, you can choose to “assess by census”. Here, you can select from a number of electrical appliances and their quantities to see exactly how much of electricity units are being used and how much you would be charged for it. If you’re the type of person who is meticulous about electricity consumption or you feel that there might be an issue with the calculation, you can carry out your own calculation here.
That’s not all, though
Apart from these features, the CEB Care Mobile App also has features such as maintaining electricity accounts and a user profile as well. You can add multiple accounts and they will all be under the same profile.
Overall, we like what we found with the CEB Care Mobile App. The ability to lodge complaints and view the dates of upcoming power outages is indeed a welcome feature. But this is also viable only if the features are maintained.
If customers are lodging complaints through the app and they are not being seen to, then we’re back to square one with how the CEB responds to these events. In addition, just keeping a calendar and not adding the dates of possible power outages makes the calendar redundant. Not to mention it annoys us more.
Seeing as the CEB Care Mobile App was launched only around a month ago, it’s possible that the app will undergo future additions and improvements. The same features are more or less available on the desktop website of the CEB. The advantage of the CEB Care Mobile App is that it’s mobile.
All things considered, the CEB has done quite a good job with the CEB Care Mobile App. If you’re interested in checking it out, you can download it for your Android device here. For iOS, you can head here.
