I don't think it works like that. Meter readers are contractual either on behalf of the supplier or employed direct by supplier. I guess they can send a person if they want someone to be busy instead of sitting in an ASDA car park, however it cannot be cost effective to send multiple people to the one address over and over within the same week/month. Might be fine in a town or urban area, but as you go rural your just wasting fuel and man hours.
Most meter reading is done on behalf of the power companies. It doesnt make sense to send 12 different meter readers down the the same street, so one does the lot and the data is sent back to the power companies.
And yes, there is a massive amount of time spent (by me) making sure that they are as efficient as possible by trying to align all the work for all the power companies so they 'call off' the same streets at the same time.
And yes, one of our key data points is how many attempts are made to get a read, obviously we would like to visit every property and get a read every time, but obviously you dont.
So how many times do you attempt it? Both from an economic point of view in terms of direct effort and also to make sure you get enough reads to satisfy OFGEM and not be fined. That's the key balancing act.