Does OVO have a UK Call Centre?

Try downloading one of the ofgem regulated 3rd party apps and see if they can see your gas readings. For example 

https://hugoenergyapp.co.uk/

It will help narrow down if it is an ovo issue or a meter/connection etc issue 

Thanks but I was thinking more along the lines of speaking to a U.K. call centre because of the quality of service, I’m weary with struggling to communicate with someone who speaks English as a second language.

There is only one call centre number as far as I am aware. The reason Jeffus mentioned the alternative usage capabilities is that if there’s a problem with your meter readings getting to your supplier, unless you give a manual reading, they will be estimated

Thanks, I know that but someone told me that calls flip through to the overseas call centre when there’s peak demand and when it’s quoted they’re answered in the U.K., I may be wrong though.

It’s more likely to happen as an overspill thing. However, Live Chat tends to be faster as agents can deal with more than one conversation at a time if needed - try it via https://ovoenergy.com/help as I find that works better.

I’m not concerned about their level of training, it’s more a case of their level of English, the agent I spoke to the other day was pleasant and helpful enough but a challenge to say the least, her accent was so strong I had to keep asking her to repeat herself and she appeared to be struggling in understanding me, forgive me if this sounds impolite but I don’t think I should have to struggle to make myself understood, something which made a difficult query even more hard to handle. Please don’t suggest live chat either as I get nowhere with that for the same reason.

Leaving this here as information for others.  

I spoke to the 'Collections' team. Seems they are in South Africa, we’re helpful, but don’t have direct contact with credit reference agencies. The agent has sent a message to the OVO ‘credit amendment team’ (presumably an admin team, guessing probably in the UK) who will update the credit agencies.

What exactly that update entails, and will say, I don't know.  Hopefully at minimum a note will be put against the missed payment records saying “cst was not aware of mthly payment requirement post move from qtly payments at acquired SSE Energy”, seems unlikely there will be a removal/retraction of the missed payment reports (and unsure if that even possible). My guess is none of it will actually help my top line credit rating number, and will require a lender to dig into the missed payment reports to see a note.

The agent told me there was around a 30 timeline for this to be actioned. It wasn't clear if that is 30 days for the credit reference agency, or simply to get Ovo credit amendment team to action the issue.

She could not give me any direct contact to the Ovo credit amendment team (or even a direct number to her team, nor a call reference number though apparently a record of the call should be seen in internal systems). You have to go through the main switchboard, ask for the ‘collections team’ and they interface with the credit amendment team.

None of this is good, and likely about to have a massively negative impact on my life. But here we are, welcome to the future. You’ve never missed a (qtly) payment, your supplier gets acquired but quickly decides you’re a poor payor cause they want it monthly. Then the computer says NO, now it will take months for humans to maybe undo some of that impact for it say yes. But assume the worse, that’s the likely outcome.

I’m sorry for this stressful experience you’ve had. You should have received communications from OVO stating that you’d be billed monthly & therefore a monthly payment would be expected.

I hope the credit amendment team get this resolved for you.

Please keep us posted with how you get on @theorg.