Hello @Durtydenn ,

Please note that this comment was written by an independent forum volunteer, and not by OVO staff.

The OVO Forum runs on a different system to that of OVO’s other online services. It is deliberately set up to use a different account so that you can maintain privacy and have a public identity here that shields your personal details from the world. It is extremely rare that someone fails to recognise this and it shouldn’t need to be explicitly spelled out - over 99% of users here seem to have no trouble at all with this.

Single Sign-On is being considered as an option for the future between the two sides but I must otherwise disagree with you. We have pretty much never seen complaints about this before.

Yes, this can be confusing. There are (at least) three OVO sites that all have pretty much the same ‘branding’ - colours, logo, even a proprietary typeface:

• www.ovoenergy.com - this is the public site which includes the help pages for OVO customers.
• forum.ovoenergy.com - where we are now. This is also public, open to everyone to read, but visitors are only able to make posts if they have created a forum account. 
• account.ovoenergy.com - this is the private bit, only accessible by OVO customers and giving access to their account details and data.

This is a common arrangement where a company provides a space for its customers to converse among themselves, and it’s deliberately kept separate from the private bits to maintain that privacy. I can’t see how it could lead to ‘Account access issues.’  

Since the Account website uses an email address as the username part of the authentication process, it’s probably a good idea to use a different email address for the forum. The password should in any circumstances be different.

It’s a bit surprising that ‘a long time OVO user’ hasn’t found his way to the forums earlier, unless of course he’s never needed to ask fellow customers for help or advice. There’s a wealth of information here that supplements the ‘official’ help pages, so I’d suggest you have a look around. 

Yep I agree with the comments above. 

It would be a better experience for a new forum visitor to have the option of using their OVO online account login credentials for the forum profile. @Durtydenn you can vote on this existing idea here:

Hello again, thank you for the responses. I did indeed have a forum account/from years back. Long forgotten, until I pump in a more recent email ID. This reminded and prompted me to reenter the forum password lost process with an older email ID.

My main point in writing was to suggest that at the point of entry into the forum area there could easily be an explicit message, warning would be entrants that the normal customer account area and the Forum were different. The Username and email address issues mentioned by others are good examples.

Ultimately, this suggestion feels like a solution in search of a problem. It may be quick to implement, but it only solves a problem that one user out of 100k+ have had. As such, it’s just not worth it.