Offline customer guidance

Offline customers: energy sector

An eligible CDR consumer in the energy sector may have online access to their energy account. However, this is not a pre-requisite. Energy consumers without online access to their energy account, also known as ‘offline customers’, are also eligible to share data. That is, while all eligible CDR consumers – including ‘offline customers’ – will primarily engage with the CDR online, they are not required to have online access to their energy account to do this.  

Data holders must take reasonable steps to support data sharing for consumers who do not have online access to their energy account(s). Data holders must not impose additional eligibility requirements, such as requiring an offline customer to register for online account access before they can share data.

Offline customers: authentication

The CX Guidelines demonstrate appropriate support paths that could be made available to consumers outside of the authentication process. External support paths could, for example, be used to help an offline customer locate an appropriate identifier for the purposes of authentication or update their contact details to receive a one-time password. External support paths may be used to offer online registration, but online account access cannot be required or presented as a pre-requisite for data sharing.

See accompanying CX Guidelines 

Offline customers: dashboards

Data holders must provide a dashboard for consumers with existing online account access and must offer a dashboard to consumers without online account access. Authorisation withdrawal instructions must be provided in the authorisation flow, but dashboards are expected to be offered to offline customers externally once they have completed authorisation. The CX Guidelines recommend that data holders provide CDR Receipts to consumers, which a DH could use to offer dashboards to offline customers. It is at the data holder’s discretion to make a dashboard accessible via an online account or another mechanism, such as a one-time password that could, for example, be used on a website set up by the data holder.

See accompanying CX Guidelines

More information

See section 5.3.1 of the Compliance guide for data holders - energy sector