People often ask me how I came up with the idea of TrustDALE.com. Well, here’s the story. I was sitting on my sofa watching TV in 2008, when I saw a commercial for the umpteenth time, featuring a woman dancing in her kitchen with her kids all around, celebrating that she’d just saved $100 off her natural gas bill. The company was spending a fortune running this ad over and over, but no one I asked had a clue what it really meant. So, I played it back, read the fine print on the screen and discovered the crazy truth. The only way to get the $100 in “savings,” was to sign up for the company’s most expensive plan, pay hundreds of dollars more than you should for twenty consecutive months, just to get that $100 off!
That kind of advertising drives me crazy. I then put my investigators’ cap on, visited Georgia’s Public Service Commission website, and discovered who truly offered the best price when choosing a natural gas provider, and it’s the same company sixteen years later, True Natural Gas. Surprised? I hope not, because I’ve been telling their story through TrustDALE.com for almost as long as I’ve known the truth. I wanted to ask the folks at True Natural Gas their secret to being the consistent low-cost leader.
Leslie Marler, President of True Natural Gas, told us, "Gas is gas. All of the marketers are providing the same gas. What we try to do is make a difference in offering just real honest, straightforward, low pricing. We post the prices on the fifth of every month with the Public Service Commission. We also have the prices on our web. There's not a lot of gimmicks or anything like that that we feel are of true benefit to our customers."
You may wonder, don't their competitors do the same thing? I asked that question to the folks at True Natural Gas.
Their answer: "Not to the extent we do. For example, all the marketers use and pay for the infrastructure provided by Atlanta Gas Light, like interstate gas pipelines. We are very careful to maximize what we use and sell off what we don’t. We also realized very early that excessive bad debt will destroy earnings. That’s why we look closely at a customer’s credit score at the time they apply for service and monitor accounts closely every month for timely payment."
Like everything else, you need to be savvy about your bill and the rates you're being charged.
True Natural Gas explained, "Customers need to look at their bill! Make sure they know what they’re paying per therm (the measurable unit for natural gas) and make sure they’re not on a variable rate which can be 3 times more expensive than a fixed rate. "
Another important point- True Natural Gas is owned by Coweta-Fayette EMC, an electric cooperative. True Natural Gas explained why that matters, saying, "First, we’re not greedy, we maintain reasonable profit margins, but just as important, we care deeply about customer service. If you visit the Public Service Commission website, you’ll see we are consistently rated by consumers as the top provider when you take in to account the size of our customer base."
Leslie Marler says being part of Coweta-Fayette EMC is a big part of True Natural Gas' amazing customer service. She told us, "We also have the benefit of being a subsidiary of Cowetta-Fayette EMC, so there's a lot of knowledge on energy here in the building that we're able to bat around questions and ideas of how we can improve customer service."
I see so many of True Natural Gas' competitors, especially in TV commercials, constantly trying to woo customers with offers, which is a nice word for gimmicks. The team at True Natural Gas told me why they don't do that, saying, "We thought long and hard about what we could do to compete, and we settled on something we feel is much better. Instead of harming our current customers financially by offering gift cards or cheaper plans to recruit new customers, we focus on keeping our customers with a loyalty program we call True Rewards.
You see, everyone pays their natural gas provider a service fee on top of their price per therm. The longer you stay with us, the less you’ll pay every month in customer service fees, and for our residential customers receiving the full $2.50 monthly discount, that amounts to saving another 4 cents per therm!"
True Natural Gas President Leslie Marler sums it up like this, "Once you're in our family, we try to really take care of you."
That's why TrustDALE believes you can hire True Natural Gas, then set it and forget it! Here’s a final word about natural gas providers. I favor the marketers owned by electrical cooperatives because their parent companies are not for profit, and care deeply about their customers.
And thanks to Georgia law, you don’t have to be a member of that cooperative to be their gas customer! Now that you know you can truly save hundreds of dollars every year by choosing True Natural Gas, I hope you’ll do so, and tell them Dale sent you!