I built up some standing charge debt which OVO took approx 80% of every top up I made (which made trying to keep my home warm during the winter impossible!)
I tried to get the % of each top up they took lowered, however, they would claim they had done it on the telephone, but didn’t.
i did a web chat on several occasions, asked to complain and was told “you can’t complain, it’s debt” and they would end the web chat on me.
I paid off the debt and transferred to another company.
i received my final statement from OVO, keep in mind I was pay as you, and they claim I owe them £1000, saying in one month my gas consumption alone was £614.
i was on pay as you go, I was unable to use gas I did not top up my meter to use.
My standing charge debt I had run up was paid off before I left, but they claim this debt on my final statement is actually gas consumption.
i have tried to complain again about this and get it rectified, but they constantly transfer me around department to department, cut off my call and once again making a complaint so I can go to the ombudsman is just impossible.
I have emailed their CEO complaints team (both in Octoner and November) and they just do not respond.
I am literally at breaking point with all of this!
It may be that your meter went into a ‘non disconnect’ mode during the migration process, where a debt balance was built up. Sometimes standing charges build up if a customer doesn’t top up gas for a long period of time, say over winter.
Ever got to winter, topped up your gas meter for the first time in a long time and found the credit disappears, this topic should explain why. Let’s first talk about standing charges… What are they? And why do we pay them? Standing charges are a set, daily amount that you pay no matter how much energy you use. It covers the cost of the supplier to supply energy to your home.
For traditional top up meters, standing charge debt will build up daily but won’t show up on the balance.
To see the standing charge debt on your gas meter follow these instructions: Firstly, make sure your top up card is out of the meter, then tap the red A button to turn the meter on. It will then say “PLEASE WAIT” and show your current meter balance, lightly tap the red A button again once and this will take you to the “OWED” screen, which will show the outstanding amount.
You might be wondering, ‘how do I pay this amount back?’ When there is balance outstanding on the “owed” screen the meter will take up to 70% of your top up until this has been cleared. Please be aware if you’ve used your emergency credit this will not be available to use again until the amount on the “Owed” screen has been cleared.
We don’t have access to your account on the Forum but the PAYG team should be able to investigate this further for you.
How to get in contact about my OVO Pay As You Go account
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I was still with OVO when I was going through the start of my process, and this is what they did at the start of my process, said I had to deal with collections, they put me through to collections and I spent 2 days back and forth, collections saying they only deal with Pay Monthly Direct Debit customers, putting me back through to the PAYG team.. explaining it again to them, to them go back to “collections” to be told they only deal with direct debit.
Perhaps it is different if you have already have a closed account, perhaps collections do deal with it..
It was well over a year ago now so I’ve forgotten about the whole shambles of getting them to eventually let me make a complaint.
It sounds like your journey could take me on a trip down memory lane though!
But, it sounds like you’re starting to embark on much of the same journey I did.
@Firedog , you would think that no one is barred from making a complaint about anything, but after losing the will to live with calling them, I tried a web chat.. This is a screenshot of their response to me wanting to make a complaint about me disputing the debt and how they were treating me, despite me being on their PSR for various reasons. I’ve cropped it to protect personal information.
The conversation was ended by OVO, that being their last message to me on that web chat.
Of course you can enter a complaint about anything a supplier does or fails to do. Their first line of defence is Support, who (statistics show) manage to resolve the majority of cases without them having to go further. This of course applies to the simple, known problems with solutions known to support staff. Yours wasn’t one of these, so the agent you were chatting with brushed you off. That Is a bit surprising, because being on the PSR means that any call to support should be fielded by an agent specially trained to help vulnerable customers whatever their problem.
A few years ago, OVO used to have an online complaint form with labelled fields for the information needed. I can’t find it now, so you have to try and guess what they need. I would email complaints@ovoenergy.com using the email address registered on my account. Emails from any other address will probably get lost. I would give the subject as COMPLAINT: A/c no. nnnnnnn and start the text with a list of every conceivable bit of pertinent personal information: name, a/c no., DOB, supply address, billing address, email address, phone number, MPAN, MSN …, then a chronology of what has happened so far. That shouldn’t be ignored.
This was the response, to give you a bit of background, because I was going around in circles with their call centre, refused by web chat.. and I was so worn down by this point, when I emailed them to complain on that e-mail address you gave (and according to their complaints web page, you call different telephone numbers for pay monthly to complain, but emailing, it doesn’t state it’s for pay monthly customers only) I asked for e-mail contact only as I was so fed up with being passed around their cell centre departments I realised I needed to build some kind of paper trail as evidence I had tried everything I could to make a complaint.. and this was the response from that exact e-mail address…
Again, I’ve cropped it to protect the agents personal info and mine..
Apologies for the highlighted OVO, the only way to find it amongst my screenshots was to search “OVO” and it highlights the word you have searched on the photo.
At the beginning of most calls, they asked me to confirm I was on their PSR.. so every agent was aware I was on their PSR and the reasons I was on their PSR if I saw that I would think “I need to handle this sensitively”….
To say I was bullied by them was an understatement.
And since the debt they falsely claimed I owed them was so high, when I was trying to change supplier, they blocked it.
I did exactly that … this was the response from that exact e-mail address …
I’m almost speechless, but here are a couple of points:
Anyone who has a vulnerability that qualifies for inclusion on the PSR should not be on a PAYG contract. A prepayment meter is designed to cut off the supply if it detects no credit. This state isn’t always the customer’s fault, but being off-supply is not only inconvenient - it’s potentially dangerous. Credit customers are much less likely to end up in this situation.
I too have repeatedly asked if communication between me and OVO can always be conducted in writing. I understand that there are some transactions that have to be carried out orally, for reasons that I just don’t understand, but that’s the way it is.
This experience of yours was almost a year ago. I’m told that OVO have been trying hard to improve their complaint handling, so I’d like to think that if your journey were to start today, your experience would be less harrowing. Sadly, @pitchris’s saga doesn’t suggest anything of the sort. For a customer on the PSR to feel bullied by service personnel is unforgiveable. I’ll ask the forum moderators if there’s anything they can do to ease his journey through the system.
Having telephoned on 18 January - when I was given a complaint number and told that they would get back to me the following Monday or Turesday - having heard nothing by the 24th, I emailed the complaints department directly.
A week later and still nothing, though I have received yet another “final bill”.
As I said before, I’m a journalist… I’m strict *edited by moderator* when it comes to facts and keeping note of absolutely everything. Every call to my phone is automatically reorced and I own my own domain name so emails cannot ‘get lost’, ‘missed’ or ‘diverted to my junk folder’.
@pitchris , do you still actively publish things as a journalist?
I think how OVO treat their customers would make a fantastic piece!
I would happily forward you the convo on a WebChat which I screenshot where I am clearly told “you can’t complain as it’s debt you owe” and my outcome letter from the Ombudsman stating actually, they was wrong, they owed me money!
The Ombudsman get you to create a case and OVO and it’s all uploaded to a portal, I’m sure I’d still have access to it and OVO upload everything they hold on you I’m pretty sure.
Please note that the Best Answer is intended to help the wider community. It is not about whether your problem got solved because we rarely get told as most folks don’t come back.
These threads tend to stay up for years after you move on, so the Best Answer that gets tagged needs to be one that stands the test of time.
As much I’d love to ask OVO to make it so that Questions here could just auto-solve when a linked case/complaint/support request got solved, there’s just no practical way of doing so - especially because folks from other suppliers also come here and we definitely can’t hook the Forum up to every single suppliers systems.
That’s the basic reason why the assignment has to be manual and runs the way it does. The Forum runs standalone from everything else because we’re not allowed to have it hooked up to other systems, in case it exposes something to the community which needs to stay private.
I’m sorry if it means things don’t work the way you may prefer, but it’s a tricky balance and we can’t make it perfect.
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