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When will I receive my compensation for a missed engineer appointment?

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
December 21, 2017
91 replies
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I signed up for a new smart meter and arranged an appointment to have it installed. The engineer failed to turn up and so I telephoned Customer Services to arrange another appointment. The agent went through her script and advised me that if I was not in when the engineer called there would be a £30 charge. I asked if that also applied where the engineer failed to turn up. She checked and said that it did and that she would arrange to credit my account with £30. So far I have not received the credit. When will it come?

Best answer by Tim_OVO

Updated on 28/04/26 by Abby_OVO

Sorry to hear about your missed smart meter appointment. As our Support Team has advised, if the engineer failed to attend without at least 24 hours notice of a cancellation, you may be eligible for a standard £40 compensation known as Guaranteed Standards of Performance (GSOP) payment.

The UK’s energy regulator, Ofgem, advises energy suppliers on Guaranteed Standards of Performance. This is sometimes called GSOP. Energy suppliers in the UK have to meet these standards for our customers, or we’ll owe you compensation.

What are Guaranteed Standards of Performance (GSOP)?

Guaranteed Standards of Performance are the promises we make to you, as your energy supplier.

We’ll always do our best to keep these promises. If for some reason we don’t meet the guaranteed standards, we’ll pay £40 directly into your OVO Energy account. This is our way of saying sorry. It’s sometimes called GSOP compensation, or a GSOP payment.

Meter appointments

Sometimes you might have to book an appointment for an OVO engineer to visit your home – for example, to fit a new meter.

If you contact us to book an appointment, we’ll do our best to:

Give you a date that’s as soon as possible (you’ll get a 4-hour time slot)
Let you know at least 1 working day in advance if we need to rearrange your slot

And we’ll do everything we can to make sure your appointment goes as smoothly as it should. That includes sending an engineer who has the skills, experience, and resources to do the job.

If we fail to do any of the above, we’ll pay £40 into your account.

Reconnecting your supply

If you’ve been taken off supply because of unpaid charges, and these have now been paid, we promise to get your gas and/or electricity back up and running quickly. We’ll reconnect your supply within 24 hours.

Please note: if you pay your charges outside of working hours, we’ll aim to reconnect your supply the next working day.

If it takes longer than 24 hours to get your power back on, we’ll pay you £40.

Faulty Credit meters

We’re committed to providing you with the highest level of service. As part of this commitment, we’ll adhere to the following timelines regarding the assessment of your meter:

Complete an assessment of whether or not the meter is faulty within 5 working days.
Agree on an appropriate action within 5 working days following the assessment.
Confirm the result of the assessment and the agreed actions in writing.

If we fail to meet any of these commitments, we will compensate you £40 per failure. Additionally, if we do not make the £40 payment within 10 working days of the failure, we will pay you an additional £40.

Faulty Prepayment meters

If you think your prepayment meter is broken and you’ve lost power, we will:

Arrive at your home, or fix the issue remotely, within 3 hours if contacted during a working day (Monday-Friday, 8am-8pm), or
Arrive at your home within 4 hours if contacted on a weekend or bank holiday

If you think your prepayment meter is broken, but your power’s still on, we’ll take action to:

Confirm whether the meter is faulty
Fix the fault, or
Replace the meter

This will happen within 3 hours if you contact us during a working day, or 4 hours on weekends and bank holidays. If you contact us outside of working hours, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can the next day.

If we fail to live up to these promises, you’ll get a £40 payment from us.

Final billing

Leaving OVO? We’ll be sad to see you go!

We’ll send you a final statement within 6 weeks after you tell us you’re moving out, or your new energy supplier tells us you’re switching. If we don’t meet that 6 week deadline, we’ll pay you £40 in GSOP compensation.

Refunding final credit balance

After we send your final bill, if you have a positive balance left in your account, you’ll get it automatically refunded.

If this doesn’t happen within 10 working days, we’ll send you a £40 GSOP payment.

15 working day switch

When you switch to OVO, we’re excited to get you up and running as quickly as possible.

With faster switching, changing energy suppliers will usually take around 5 working days, unless we have agreed a different date with you. There may be scenarios when your switch may take a bit longer, please see the “When switching might take longer” section of our Faster Switching Policy for more details. If we don’t switch you within 15 days then we will pay you £40 GSOP compensation.

We won’t pay any compensation where we take longer than 15 days if we don’t have all the information needed for the switch, we believe there is evidence of a fraudulent switch or your switch is delayed for any other reason outside our control.

Erroneous transfer

Have you been switched to OVO by mistake? If you get a welcome letter or a final energy bill you weren’t expecting, don’t worry. Just get in touch with your energy supplier to let them know.

If your supply was transferred to OVO without your permission, we’ll owe you erroneous transfer compensation. This will be £40 or more.

The amount you get, and which supplier pays it, will depend on the exact circumstances of the erroneous transfer. See Ofgem’s website for more details.

Find out more about erroneous transfers and why they happen

Electricity Distribution Networks and Gas Transporters

Electricity Distribution Networks and Gas Transporters are separate to your energy supplier. They’re responsible for the infrastructure (like towers and cables) that actually gets gas and electricity to your home.

If they cause a fault or an issue, they might be required to pay you compensation. Sometimes, we’ll be asked to make that payment on their behalf.

If that happens, we’ll pay it straight into your OVO account. If you don’t get it within 10 working days, we’ll add £40 to it.

What isn't GSOP?

In some situations, we might not offer a £40 GSOP payment. These can include:

If one of our engineers is unable to make it to your appointment because of a situation beyond our control, such as severe weather conditions
If you tell us that you don't want us to do anything about the problem you reported
If your meter's been tampered with
If we can’t get access to your meter or home
If you turn down our offer to fix a faulty prepayment meter
And remember: all of the information on this page is subject to change if Ofgem publishes new guidance.

If you’ve not seen the payment applied after 10 days reach out to our Support Team. If you’re eligible but the payment is delayed you might be owed double! 🆒 Check out the topic below for even more information:

OVO member but not got a smart meter yet? - Book today!

Interested but not yet an OVO member? - Check out our plans!

Show previous replies

Tim_OVO

OVO Forum Legend

I’m really sorry to hear about this no-show appointment, @cloud - not a good move by OVO to follow that up with a survey and no contact about the failure to attend.

As others have mentioned, you’re owed £30 compensation if you weren’t given at least 24 hours notice of the cancellation. If that isn’t sent within 10 working days it gets doubled.

This should happen automatically, you don’t need to request it. Worst case scenario is you get twice the compensation. Of course if you wanted to rebook or find out why the engineer failed, our Support team can help (web chat closes at 6pm on weekdays). Not sure why you can’t send OVO a Twitter direct message, what happens when you press send?

Carbon neutral - we need a community to get there! My green tech: Aclara SGM 1411-B smart meter, Chameleon IHD6

Blastoise186

Super User

Given how unreliable Twitter has been in recent months… I wouldn’t be surprised if you hit a Twitter bug and/or some kind of Twitter outage while trying to send a DM to OVO. Unfortunately, that would be beyond OVO’s control if that was the case.

Securing energy by zapping security bugs... For that is The Blastoise Way! Remember, I'm just like you - AI Powered Evil Geniuses aren't Staff!

Jeffus

Rank 20

If the OVO Twitter DM messages aren't working for some people, the OVO Social Media team simply usually ask customers to send a direct message via the OVO Facebook page. The team can read both sets of messages.

It happens sometimes with both Facebook and Twitter over the years i have used them with various companies.

S

SarahH

Newcomer

We have had an appointment where the engineer did not turn up a few weeks ago . We've not received compensation.

An engineer did turn up on Monday but it turns out that OVO had muddled the booking and given him the information for meters based in Wales. I'm in Hampshire, England. So he couldn't do the job. I reached out to OVO, again, via email and phone call. No one has even acknowledged us, despite us being with the advance resolution team now.

This has been months and months of trying to sort our issue., with confusing and contradictory responses. It is immensely frustrating.

Jeffus

Rank 20

We have had an appointment where the engineer did not turn up a few weeks ago . We've not received compensation.

An engineer did turn up on Monday but it turns out that OVO had muddled the booking and given him the information for meters based in Wales. I'm in Hampshire, England. So he couldn't do the job. I reached out to OVO, again, via email and phone call. No one has even acknowledged us, despite us being with the advance resolution team now.

This has been months and months of trying to sort our issue., with confusing and contradictory responses. It is immensely frustrating.

Hi @SarahH

Welcome to the forum, i am just a customer like you.

In theory you should have got the £30 compensation for the first missed appointment within 10 days of the missed appointment.

An engineer misses an appointment
An engineer arrives after the agreed appointment time (outside the 4-hour time slot given to you)
The installer or OVO cancels an appointment at short notice (less than 24 hours before the agreed start time on a working day)
The engineer is unable to complete the work because they were missing ‘standard’ equipment or arrived with the wrong equipment (when there had been prior notification of what was needed - this must be cross-referenced with the booking to ensure it was booked correctly)
An appointment did not go ahead due to an agent booking error
System errors such as auto cancellation and not receiving cancellation notification.

If the payment wasn't made within 10 days, then you are entitled to another £30.

You are also entitled to £30 for the Monday appointment as they didn't come with the right stuff.

Again if this isn't paid within 10 days of the appointment you are entitled to another £30.

These are legal requirements on OVO.

If you haven't already, i would put in an official complaint

https://www.ovoenergy.com/feedback

Make sure you get a complaint number and a named complaint handler.

If OVO don't sort it within 8 weeks, you can ask the Energy Ombudsman to intervene. The average compensation awarded against OVO was another £80 the last time I looked.

S

SarahH

Newcomer

We have had an appointment where the engineer did not turn up a few weeks ago . We've not received compensation.

An engineer did turn up on Monday but it turns out that OVO had muddled the booking and given him the information for meters based in Wales. I'm in Hampshire, England. So he couldn't do the job. I reached out to OVO, again, via email and phone call. No one has even acknowledged us, despite us being with the advance resolution team now.

This has been months and months of trying to sort our issue., with confusing and contradictory responses. It is immensely frustrating.

Hi @SarahH

Welcome to the forum, i am just a customer like you.

In theory you should have got the £30 compensation for the first missed appointment within 10 days of the missed appointment.

An engineer misses an appointment
An engineer arrives after the agreed appointment time (outside the 4-hour time slot given to you)
The installer or OVO cancels an appointment at short notice (less than 24 hours before the agreed start time on a working day)
The engineer is unable to complete the work because they were missing ‘standard’ equipment or arrived with the wrong equipment (when there had been prior notification of what was needed - this must be cross-referenced with the booking to ensure it was booked correctly)
An appointment did not go ahead due to an agent booking error
System errors such as auto cancellation and not receiving cancellation notification.

If the payment wasn't made within 10 days, then you are entitled to another £30.

You are also entitled to £30 for the Monday appointment as they didn't come with the right stuff.

Again if this isn't paid within 10 days of the appointment you are entitled to another £30.

These are legal requirements on OVO.

If you haven't already, i would put in an official complaint

https://www.ovoenergy.com/feedback

Make sure you get a complaint number and a named complaint handler.

If OVO don't sort it within 8 weeks, you can ask the Energy Ombudsman to intervene. The average compensation awarded against OVO was another £80 the last time I looked.

Thank you! I appreciate your time. I do have an official complaint put in. Twitter put that in for me in January. I've a reference number, is that the same as a complaint number?

I don't have a named complaint handler. I've had a few different people from the Advanced resolution team contact me over the intervening time. I'll make sure I get one.

Jeffus

Rank 20

We have had an appointment where the engineer did not turn up a few weeks ago . We've not received compensation.

An engineer did turn up on Monday but it turns out that OVO had muddled the booking and given him the information for meters based in Wales. I'm in Hampshire, England. So he couldn't do the job. I reached out to OVO, again, via email and phone call. No one has even acknowledged us, despite us being with the advance resolution team now.

This has been months and months of trying to sort our issue., with confusing and contradictory responses. It is immensely frustrating.

Hi @SarahH

Welcome to the forum, i am just a customer like you.

In theory you should have got the £30 compensation for the first missed appointment within 10 days of the missed appointment.

An engineer misses an appointment
An engineer arrives after the agreed appointment time (outside the 4-hour time slot given to you)
The installer or OVO cancels an appointment at short notice (less than 24 hours before the agreed start time on a working day)
The engineer is unable to complete the work because they were missing ‘standard’ equipment or arrived with the wrong equipment (when there had been prior notification of what was needed - this must be cross-referenced with the booking to ensure it was booked correctly)
An appointment did not go ahead due to an agent booking error
System errors such as auto cancellation and not receiving cancellation notification.

If the payment wasn't made within 10 days, then you are entitled to another £30.

You are also entitled to £30 for the Monday appointment as they didn't come with the right stuff.

Again if this isn't paid within 10 days of the appointment you are entitled to another £30.

These are legal requirements on OVO.

If you haven't already, i would put in an official complaint

https://www.ovoenergy.com/feedback

Make sure you get a complaint number and a named complaint handler.

If OVO don't sort it within 8 weeks, you can ask the Energy Ombudsman to intervene. The average compensation awarded against OVO was another £80 the last time I looked.

Thank you! I appreciate your time. I do have an official complaint put in. Twitter put that in for me in January. I've a reference number, is that the same as a complaint number?

I don't have a named complaint handler. I've had a few different people from the Advanced resolution team contact me over the intervening time. I'll make sure I get one.

That should be the complaint number then if you asked via Twitter for a complaint to be raised. Luckily you will have an audit trail of the conversation on Twitter.

You should now be able to go directly to the Energy Ombudsman as the 8 weeks is up.

You can always ask OVO for a deadlock letter as the 8 weeks is up, but it isn't necessary.

If for any reason OVO didn't actually raise a complaint that really is their issue if you asked for it in the Twitter conversation.

S

SarahH

Newcomer

Thank you! I appreciate your time. I do have an official complaint put in. Twitter put that in for me in January. I've a reference number, is that the same as a complaint number?

I don't have a named complaint handler. I've had a few different people from the Advanced resolution team contact me over the intervening time. I'll make sure I get one.

That should be the complaint number then if you asked via Twitter for a complaint to be raised. Luckily you will have an audit trail of the conversation on Twitter.

You should now be able to go directly to the Energy Ombudsman as the 8 weeks is up.

You can always ask OVO for a deadlock letter as the 8 weeks is up, but it isn't necessary.

If for any reason OVO didn't actually raise a complaint that really is their issue if you asked for it in the Twitter conversation.

Great, that's really helpful. I've got a document written with a full time line and complete trail of evidence. Thankfully I hate talking on the phone, so there's only a couple of points of contact that aren't recorded.

In todays email I gave OVO notice that if there wasn't a swift resolution that I'd be taking them to the ombudsman. So I'll give them a couple of days and then do that. We just want working smart meters so we can access time of use tariffs.