The Essential Services Commission researched customer experiences following regulatory reforms to the energy market. This includes:

• the Payment Difficulty Framework, which was implemented on 1 January 2019
• energy retail market reforms, implemented on 1 July 2019
• baseline reporting on assistance for customers affected by family violence, as a bench-marking exercise before family violence amendments to the Energy Retail Code come into effect on 1 January 2020.

These regulatory reforms are part of the Essential Services Commission's new responsibility based approach to regulation, including their response to recommendations from an independent bipartisan review of electricity and gas retail markets and the Royal Commission into Family Violence. Interviews were conducted with financial counsellors (including specialist family violence financial counsellors), community workers and volunteers, as well as Victorian energy consumers, to find out how recent reforms have worked in practice for energy consumers. Some of these findings were also published in the 2018-19 Victorian Energy Market Report.