Hey @Firedog,

Yes, you’re quite right and thanks for raising this! I’ll flag internally and keep you posted

I agree, or in my case plan on leaving Ovo.

This is a Community Forum that is volunteer led, not OVO Official Support. If you seek Official responses from OVO, you're in the wrong place.

If however, you're OK with personal responses from Forum Volunteers like myself, this is definitely the place to ask. 

Hey @Firedog,

I raised this internally and it’s been picked up by our Legal Team.

They are going to make the updates, it will take a bit of time though as we need the product team to update the website.

Thanks so much for raising!

But almost all the questions on here do require an official response from OVO which you can’t give so what is the point ?  Emmanuelle_OVO pops up from time to to time with machine generated answers *edited by moderator*.

Community Management 101: Let the users lead the way by forging their own path, and don’t let moderators dominate everything. The community isn’t your company soapbox and it shouldn’t be treated like one by staff.

Emmanuelle doesn’t have the time to write personalised replies to absolutely everyone. If she tried to do that, she wouldn’t have time to do anything else that’s extremely important, like deal with moderation issues, raise things internally or ask for advice from internal colleagues. All stuff that can only be done by a Moderator. If we had her do personal replies to literally everything, all she’d end up doing all day is writing one or two super long personal replies while the entire Forum gets backlogged with spam and other junk. Personal replies are what the users like myself do because that’s the purpose of the community.

The way that Emmanuelle and the other moderators here respond is pretty standard across just about any Community Forum where the primary purpose is to provide Community based peer-to-peer support. I myself have written probably hundreds or even thousands of answers that don’t require OVO to step in. I’m even in a community chock full of community managers run by the forum provider inSided - and we still help each other out on a peer-to-peer support basis over there with inSided staff floating around to check on things.

If you need or want a personal and/or official reply from OVO, I will re-iterate this Forum is not the place for that. You need https://help.ovoenergy.com for official responses that are personalised based on what OVO can see about your situation. What this Forum is about, is customers helping each other and having discussions out in the open. There’s also a lot more that happens here, like the Ideas section https://forum.ovoenergy.com/ideas which does get official responses from OVO when an Idea is accepted, progressing or rejected. And there’s also the Groups section which has at least six different use cases right now.

We use our experience and judgement to decide how to respond or answer a question. If we can help/answer it here ourselves, we will. When we get unique puzzles (we love a challenge!), we’ll aim to solve them. If we feel that a DNO or Gas Transporter might have something to say, we can reach out to them to get general thoughts and advice to pass on. If we (usually, but not always, the forum volunteers and moderators) think it’s something that could benefit from an official response from OVO, there’s a way we can ask for that to be considered. But if it’s an account-specific matter, we can’t handle those here for legal/GDPR reasons and will signpost the user to OVO Support.

It’s obvious that you haven’t read many questions. Here’s a really good one that I can easily counter your claims with - it really was one that OVO couldn’t touch because Business/Non-Domestic Supplies (which is what giant schools come under) are out of scope for a Domestic-Only Supplier like OVO. Also, this guide is literally one of the most viewed threads on this Forum ever. So much so that OVO actually then re-used it for their official blog and it’s also saved thousands upon thousands of users from ever having to ask any questions. I wrote that entire thing pretty much by myself with very little input from OVO and still managed to nail it pretty much first time.

If you have a problem with the way this forum is moderated or the conduct of staff (or volunteers) here, I encourage you to send an email to forum@ovoenergy.com to discuss it privately with the Forum Administrator. The Administrator will make the final call in such cases. All I ask is that you avoid calling out such matters publicly, as it makes that person feel bad.