Hi @aturneruk

This is primarily a forum where Customers attempt to help each other out. 

I am just a customer like you. 

Have you tried putting in a complaint?

https://www.ovoenergy.com/feedback

This might trigger further action to sort this out hopefully. 

Hey @aturneruk 

As Jeffus mentioned, the Forum is mostly made up of customers, and we ourselves don’t have access to accounts here at the Forum.

I’d recommend doing the above from Jeffus, it may also be worth getting in contact with the Support Team again to get them to double check the correct forms/requests have been sent over. I know on the engineers side it can take them a few weeks to submit their report from the appointment date, but without access to the account we cannot be sure of what the hold up is here.

Hi both,

Thanks for your advice. I raised this as a complaint and have just received the below response:

"The process that we follow to report asbestos to your DNO is to fill out a Google form with all the relevant information. This has been done on two separate occasions by two of our agents. When filling out this form, I'm afraid we receive no reference number and so there is none for me to provide."

I am very surprised to hear that the dataflow to the DNO would be a Google Form. This sounds like an internal form which is then passed to a different team for submission via the dataflow. It is very concerning that this process to report asset condition to the DNO is not working properly. 

I am surprised ovo think that is an acceptable response to what could be very serious health and safety issues in some circumstances being passed onto the DNO. 

Am surprised ovo isn't urgently phoning the DNO to find out what the issue is with the form (assuming this is a DNO rather than ovo form) 

As a lay person this feels like a serious health and safety issue if the form potentially isn't working if ovo did need to inform something more serious. 

If it were me I would ask ovo one or more of the following

1. To provide the date and time of each submission, so you can then provide this to the DNO.

2. Ask ovo to phone the DNO to investigate what has happened urgently. 

3 . Ask ovo to do another submission. Ask ovo to do the following 

- take screen shots of the submission 

- record the date and time of the submission.

- provide you the screenshot and date/time. 

Hi @aturneruk, @Jeffus and thanks for the updates and feedback. 

I wanted to step in here to clear up mentions of a Google form. This wouldn’t get sent to the Distribution Network Operator (DNO). Instead the Google form gets completed by the Support team advisor and sent to a ‘back office’ team. Beyond that, the advisor you speak to can’t have visibility of your request. The back office team will send a request in the form of a ‘data flow’ to the DNO.

The issue is that sometimes OVO say they have sent this flow, and at the same time the DNO say they haven’t received it. What I’ll do is try to find out what options our customer facing teams have when chasing this up and getting updates. 

Thanks both for your comments. 

@Jeffus I agree that this is clearly a problem with OVO’s internal processes that need looking at. Whilst in this case the result is merely a frustrated customer, it could have serious H&S implications in other cases.

@Tim_OVO thank you for your clarification regarding the Google Form. I have replied to the email following my complaint requesting this to be escalated to the back office team who submit the dataflow to get a confirmation that this has actually been done. As you said, the systemic issue of your front-line customer teams not having visibility of this process beyond the Google Form definitely needs looking at.

I am also stuck with a similar problem except that in my case it is the main fuse.  I can't get Smart Meters installed until UK Power Networks replaces my main fuse due to suspected asbestos.

UK Power Networks won't do anything unless Ovo sends them a Category B request/flow to do this.  I keep chasing Ovo, they promise to do this but it doesn't happenrt meters and am stuckhat I am 

I have made a formal complaint this morning and will take it to the Ombudsman if it isn't resolved within 8 weeks.

I can't understand why they can't just put the request through in the correct format - surely it would only take a minute?

Hey @RedCow,

I’ve responded to you on this topic: