Is the OVO website really going to be down for the rest of 2023?

Thank you so much.  Could you tell me more about incognito mode please?  I can’t get beyond a page telling me the website is not available util the end of the year

Thanks.  I use Firefox but have a VPN via AVG uf that makes a difference.  Easily switched off if it does

You could use the official ovo Twitter or Facebook pages if you use either of them

Both are official ovo support channels and the staff their can access accounts or forward on messages. 

Send a direct message rather than a public post

https://www.facebook.com/ovoenergy

Include your name, address, account number and date of birth in the direct message to pass security. 

I will add another point, a more cynical one.

I have decades of experience in sofware development and 6 months migrations sounds really too long, especially for a company that just won Best Place to Work 2023.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ovogroup_its-official-according-to-the-sunday-activity-7065985714194149376-0yFt

Let’s say I’m a developer and I have a difficult migration to do, the migration will require a lot of man-hours and cost a lot of money. Plus that migration just impacts only a few customers.

As a company, would I be temped to lose these customer instead? I don’t think I will dare to close their contract unilaterally, maybe I could think to put enought friction in the service so they eventually will leave.

Maybe … 🤔

You know, migrating to new systems isn’t always as simple as it might seem. In this case, it’s definitely NOT as simple as extracting the database, running a few scripts and then importing it again.

There’s roughly 30,000 or so customers who are still being migrated over from the old system. All of them have some kind of quirk about their account which requires manual action. Every other account that could migrate automatically, already has.

If you need to send meter readings in the meantime, Phone and Live Chat remain available. 0330 303 5063 or https://help.ovoenergy.com - make sure to tell the bot you are NOT a customer and it’ll put you through to a human.

Smart Meters will continue to send readings as normal during the migration.

Ok, but let me do the math.

Let’s assume you have 5 weeks holidays, so in year you have 47 weeks. Half a year means 23.5 weeks = 117.5 days = 940 hours.

This means 32 customers per hours (30,000 / 940 hours), in my experience software can do better, much better.

Here a suggestion, I’m trying to be helpful 😄 
You can cluster the 30,000 customer in “kind of quirk” with a pre-analysis of the data or by doing manually and document the process. Once the main patterns are clear, automate the manual step. It will make the full process faster.

Good luck! 

Has anyone differentiated between “migrating” accounts and “starting new” accounts?

If I left Ovo and then came back to Ovo 1 week later (just a silly scenario), my understanding is that I could have a new Ovo account up and running “in the new system” within a day or so, with access to my “new account / meter readings etc”. That surely has to be automated by now within Ovo???? 

So why in theory can’t Ovo provide me with a “new account” today (or in a couple of days) albeit without my historical usage data? 

Yes it would of course be nice to get my historical data migrated but I can wait for that. But preventing me from having a simple way to check my CURRENT billing and meter readings until 2024 is just silly and an incredibly poor customer management exercise. 

As I’ve said elsewhere in this chat, you can still get your current electric and gas usage from the DCC using the BRIGHT app (available on Apple & Google) and also, from their main website Glowmarkt.com, you can even download your own consumption data. And then you can be independent of Ovo’s old systems.

That’s correct. It’s tied to the property. Whichever billing system manages a particular property is the one that ALL accounts at that property will be linked to, regardless of age and no matter how many times you cycle through new accounts.

When the property is migrated from legacy Apollo to the new billing platform Orion, whatever account is attached to the property at that time also gets migrated to Orion at the same time. Future accounts created at the same property after that point will also be onboarded to Orion rather than Apollo. Likewise, the Apollo system will no longer “see” anything at that property once Orion takes over. Until that property is migrated however, it remains under Apollo management along with all accounts created for that property.

Once the migration is fully complete, Orion will be the only billing system being used by OVO. Apollo will be fully terminated once the last customer is migrated away from it.

My sources for this information are a combination of forum resources, discussions with other forum volunteers and information provided to me directly by forum moderators. And tons upon tons of reading of old forum threads here going back years.

We don’t usually mention the Orion name here, but I felt it made this explanation easier.

The point I was highlighting / questioning was the value / need of historical data versus the value of a connected (smart) account. To take my example a little further, if someone moved to a new house today (not a few years ago) for which Ovo (and its affiliations) had no previous accounts, would that new account be started in Orion or Apollo? My assumption is Orion. Or are you saying perhaps for some geographical reason a particular area may still start a completely fresh new Apollo account today even though Ovo intend to shut it down by the end of the year and switch it to Orion? 

The point being, if it is such an enormous painful manual task switching the last 30,000 customers out of Apollo, why not ditch the historical data and just start from a clean slate? The question makes me think that Ovo believes there is value in the historical data for themselves, let alone for the customer. Which I also find amusing given the number of inaccurate projections they make for my own account, suggesting that the historical data is not actually that valuable.

Personally I’m waiting to see what happens in July, when the new price cap kicks in properly. Today Ovo do have a new fixed price scheme that would save some money compared to the current Simpler Energy. Having Solar Panels it galls me that Ovo pay a pittance for energy I give back to the grid. Now I have the Bright app I can still easily see my consumption  (and download it) regardless of the Provider. What is annoying is having to phone up Ovo to give them monthly meter readings to ensure they bill correctly, even though they have all the data they need at their finger tips to get it correct themselves, but they can’t manage it. 

@Blastoise186 Thanks for your interesting comments and insights. Your description of my “Economy 7” account being “unusual and exotic” seems incongruous given that it’s a standard product they sell. But you may be right as when I switched to Economy 7 2.5 years ago (when I got my solar panels), Ovo did make a big mess of the account change. Given that the future of electricity supply is probably going to include far more varying daily rate bands,  (such that Economy 7 will seem trivial) I do hope for Ovo’s sake that their Orion billing system is being designed well. 

In conclusion, removing a customers account interface via the web is a big mistake.

Not from what I know of. Orion is still learning how to handle Economy 7 properly and that functionality is being expanded. It’s now capable of partial E7 support in that it can take - for example - a Day and Night Reading from a single meter and figure out the charges from that. But Multi-MPAN setups were still choking it for quite a long time… And Multi-MPAN was extremely common with Economy 7 due to having two meters quite often.

Might be useful to have that. :)