Anyone else had issues agreeing a Direct Debit amount that stays in place via OVO Customer Services?

You can be wary as much as you want.

I won't accept the shoddy 'service' OVO offer. 

I also want to chip in here as well. Oh, and like @Jeffus , I am one of the forum volunteers. Neither of us work for OVO but we are trusted to be able to help out on this forum.

I’ve found OVO’s UK based Support Team to be amazingly good - especially compared to the India/Bangladesh/Philippines based call centres SSE had a habit of using when I was supplied by them between 2018 and late 2020. I actually figured out that after OVO bought out SSE Energy Services they’d eventually merge SSE’s side of things into OVO, so I effectively jumped the queue by switching manually way before they’d even started to migrate anyone. The fact that I have experience of both sides also works to my advantage because I know both platforms extremely well.

However, I do echo Jeffus’s warning regarding cancelling the Direct Debit. OVO requires you to keep one active if you’re on a fixed rate tariff and you will almost certainly be asked to re-instate it to remain on the tariff. If you refuse, there is a possibility you will be ejected from the tariff and forced to surf the variable rate tariffs. I don’t know exactly how OVO will handle this, but you will need to discuss that with them to find a solution.

As for my Direct Debit, I actually deliberately choose to overpay by more than 100% of what I should be paying and this is a personal choice. OVO has actually warned me not to increase my payments any further or make any further manual payments - and in fact the system keeps trying to reduce my Direct Debit, but I keep overriding it because I’m happy as I am. In actual fact, my fixed rate deal is pretty cheap so my £40 a month payments more than crush every single bill I get. It’s an example of how the system actually does work - and no… OVO does not just keep bumping up DD payments just to claw in more cash (not that they can use it anyway). There really is a safety measure in place to stop the system automatically pushing it up for people who actually do pay more than what’s needed!

Yes, I had a similar experience here. I appreciate that everybody wants to set DD a bit higher to ward of risks of non-payment or rising prices. But mine was just calculated wrong, and this discussion has been going on for 4 months now without a resolution. The computer seems to be very quick to put up DD, but the process to keep it down is much slower, and consumes insane amounts of time. 

On the plus side, the refund process works quite well, but it defeats the purpose of just having a constant amount going out every month. 

I feel as if there’s a justified reason for the system being slower to drop payments than to raise them. Raising them sooner prevents the account going into debt as easily, but dropping payments too rapidly increases the risk of an account going into debt.

Let me put this into perspective using another angle. The Discourse forum software has a sort of ranking system called Trust Levels that has some pretty clever features that make sense when used properly. The idea is to not give new members too much power immediately in order to limit the damage to themselves or the community, but slowly unlock more power as the user gains experience. For example, at Trust Level 0 you can’t send a PM to anyone else (useful to prevent PM spam!) but you can reply to threads. Once you get to Trust Level 1, you can start using features like the PM system and a few of the most strict moderation limits are lifted.

Once you get to Trust Level 3, you must remain sufficiently active on the community in order to maintain your status, otherwise you drop back down to TL2 automatically. The idea is to avoid inactive users keeping overpowered permissions forever, because that otherwise becomes a security risk.

However, after you gain TL3 there’s a mechanism to avoid you constantly see-sawing between TL2 and TL3, after you get promoted to TL3 you are automatically protected from being demoted for two weeks. If you’re still active enough, you keep the status. But if you vanish in that time, you’ll get demoted at some point after the grace period expires. The whole idea is to reduce the risk and noise of a see-saw effect and it works pretty well.

I see the same concept with what OVO is doing. It seems to me that OVO is trying to avoid a constant swing of payments going up and down. Is it a perfect system? Nope! Definitely not perfect now and definitely won’t ever be perfect for everyone. But is it better than the other scenario? Almost certainly.

In my experience, it’s ultimately better to let the account run on autopilot than to manually keep forcing things in a particular direction. Most of the time, the supplier has it figured out better than the customer, but if you really think the autopilot has gone wrong, the best solution is always the easiest… Talk to your supplier and work with them on a fix.

I was with Scottish Power for three years as when I moved into my present house they were the supplier . They were pretty bad and after lots of ups and downs with them  even though I had just fixed for another year with them, I don’t know why I did that ! Kept thinking it will sort itself out eventually. I paid to come out of contract and decided to go with Ovo . I was with them in 2017 in my old house and never had a problem . 
And I’m very glad I did I find customer service very helpful and I can always get through to them after maybe a little wait. And I find the forum very good. All in all I don’t understand all these customers that have problems because when I have explained a issue I have it is always dealt with courteously and efficiently. I would recommend this company to anyone thinking of changing supplier. 

Hi @rjsimmonds 

My bill also stopped updating when I went from an OVO fixed rate to the variable rate plan. I was never with SSE. 

The actual bill was fine at the end of the billing period, and the subsequent bill is updating fine.

So it is possible there is a temporary issue with a small number of customers unrelated to the SSE migration.

At least it looks like the bill is ok at the end of the period. 

I used the usage page when the bill was not updating to keep an eye on things. 

Hope it all works out. In have found OVO generally good, although there are things that could be better.