We want to hear from you: Let’s talk about your last customer support experience

I think my bill is going up! People tell me octopus energy is substantially cheaper. I'm looking into other electricity suppliers.

When experiencing a customer service issue with a company, I am most likely to use the company’s online chat or email the company in order to try to resolve it. I will also use the company’s self-service tools on its website, such as the company’s FAQs, help centre, etc. just to see if the answer could potentially be there without having to contact them.

I will never ask any company to “make an exception” for me.

Years ago I was an SSE customer for both gas and electricity, and on 19 December 2021 they just migrated my account to OVO energy.

I am the account holder and I can explain the pattern I always follow with OVO energy. On the 20th of every month I will enter manual readings for both electricity and gas on Ovo energy’s website. I will then wait for the bill to become available on the website and once it is available I will usually pay the total charges amount in full without any further delay.

By following this pattern, it is mathematically impossible to build up any debt at all.

Even so, in January 2024 I started receiving written correspondence from OVO energy stating that I had a negative balance on my account. Over time I received many of these letters and emails. They all quoted different amounts that, according to OVO energy, I had to pay on my account, but those amounts were always around GBP £ 30. So I just assumed that by paying the total charges amount of the next bill in full the issue would be resolved, but apparently it wasn’t.

On 8th May 2025 at 12:55 I received an email from OVO energy stating that I had defaulted on my energy account.

I contacted OVO Energy Customer Care on the day by email. I asked them to explain why they believed I had defaulted on my energy account.

If I contact OVO energy by email I probably expect a response from them by email, but it seems that every single time the Customer Service Advisor [or Zero Carbon Living Advisor?] will try to call me first, using my phone number, and they will send me an email later - once they have been unable to reach me by phone.

So this is one of “the bad and the ugly” for energy customer service. For the sake of efficiency, OVO energy, next time you receive an email from me, try to reply by email from the very outset please. We will both save time that way. I will have provided a contact phone number when I set up my account but, in practice, I am very unlikely to take any of your calls during normal working hours.

Now, going back to the “debit balance” on my account. What happened after I contacted OVO energy seeking clarification? I received a friendly email later on the day, confirming that after some investigation they could see that I had been paying my bills on time every month. Briefly summarized, their exact words when I questioned the nature of the alleged debt were:

“the debit is not one missed payment as such, but has been built up over a period of time where certain payments were less than what you were charged”

I thought that would be the end of the story then but about one month later I received a not so friendly letter through the post from OVO energy inviting me to pay GBP £ 30.77 p “in order to avoid legal action”.

I replied by email on the day that letter was received. I told OVO energy that I had carefully checked my records and I disputed the amount claimed. Once again, I asked them to explain where the GBP £ 30.77 p that they claimed I owed them came from.

On 24th June 2025 I downloaded the OVO energy bill that became available on the day. I could then see that a £ 15 “missed payment charge” had been applied to my electricity and gas bill for the period 20th May 2025 – 19th June 2025 despite OVO energy having confirmed in their emails on 8 May 2025 and on 10 June 2025 that I had been paying my bills on time every month. The total charges amount was GBP £ 79.93 p. I paid that amount minus £15 because I owed OVO energy the money for the energy used the month before, but I honestly believed the £ 15 “missed payment charge” was entirely unjustified. I explained all of this in an email I sent to OVO energy on 24 June 2025. I literally told them that I did not understand why OVO energy seemed to be inviting me to try and avoid legal action on the one hand and on the other hand was expecting me to pay a £ 15 missed payment charge when they knew very well that I have never once failed to pay my bills on time. This time I asked OVO energy the following question:

“would you be able to go through the account details and be specific about which bill/s (i.e. covering which specific period/s) has/have been unpaid, underpaid or paid late? I believe it would be helpful to have this information before I ask the Energy Ombudsman to review this dispute.”

I received a reply from OVO energy by email on the day. They decided to remove the late payment fee charge for me. Later I kept receiving letters and reminders from OVO energy about my OVO energy bill being “overdue” but no specific answers from OVO energy to the simple and specific questions I had posed about how come I “owed” that money to OVO energy. Or at least not until 14 August 2025, 3 months after the first enquiry was sent. Then I received a “breakdown of billing” PDF attachment to an email OVO energy sent me about this issue which enabled me to start to work out what happened and how. But it took 11 letters / emails to get to this point.

In order to make sense of the figures in that “breakdown of billing” PDF file and try to work out the total outstanding balance, I had to rearrange the figures in my own way. I focused mainly on total charges on each bill, dates payment to OVO energy was made and amount paid each time.

I went through all the bills, charges and payments covering all months I had been an OVO energy customer, all the way back to December 2021, in order to try to work out how that outstanding balance was accumulated.

One of the first things I noticed was that OVO energy had made adjustments to historical bills without offering a single word of explanation, and I told them.

After reviewing all the information that was made available to me as from 14 August 2025 I could understand some of what must have led up to the “outstanding balance”. The origin of the issue was the first bill I got from them covering the period from 20th December 2021 to 19th January 2022. At the time I downloaded the bill that was available on OVO energy’s website. According to it the total charges amount was GBP £ 62.14 p. Then on 25th January 2022 I made a payment for exactly that amount, GBP £ 62.14 p.

Nonetheless, when I logged into my OVO energy account back in August 2025 and tried to retrieve the bill covering that period from 20th December 2021 to 19th January 2022, according to the one that could be downloaded in August 2025 for the same period the total charges are GBP £ 103.80 p.

OVO energy had made an adjustment to this historical bill without offering a single word of explanation. I think the supplier is at fault in the way the bill was calculated. OVO energy had never got in touch to inform me that this previously issued bill was incorrect, and by August 2025 they had twice told me that I had defaulted on my energy account whereas in actual fact I have never once failed to pay my bills on time.

Up to that point, they had never admitted that the debt was more than 12-months old and they were at fault in the way the bill was calculated. It would have been impossible to find out where that money “went missing from the account” in the middle of that confusion. It was like trying to see the bottom of a lake while someone is throwing stones in the water.

Conclusion: Two different bills were created for the same billing period, one for GBP £ 62.14 p and the other one for GBP £ 103.80 p. On 6th September 2025 I wrote to OVO energy asking for written confirmation that the debt was written-off. On 10th September 2025 OVO replied to me stating that as the debt was over a year old, I should not be liable for those charges. They apologised for all the inconvenience caused by this issue and also offered £ 30 goodwill as a resolution for this complaint, which I accepted. And indeed OVO energy applied the goodwill credit of £ 30 to my account but they also applied a “missed payment charge” of £ 15 simultaneously. I had to contact them about the latter but on 16 September 2025 they decided to remove the [second] late payment fee charge for me.

That was the end of the matter. It never happened again but it took 23 letters and emails to get to this point.

'I believe that the facts stated in this witness statement are true’