When will I get access to my online account?

It may be worth posting this on the OVO Trustpilot site if you haven't already.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.ovoenergy.com

Thank you and i have posted a review on Trustpilot

I am also really frustrated about this “new website” that is still claimed to be available at the end of 2023. It has wasted so much time during the last 9 months or so. Even before the website access was cut off, there were a few months when meter readings couldn’t be uploaded. Right now I’m waiting for a human to answer on whatsapp so that I can “upload” the readings.

My question is: did anyone receive a bill in December? I have received bills by email every month up to November but there was none in December.

 @Frustrated and irate 

• When is OVO open over the holidays? News

It’s New Years Day. The entire country is taking the day off.

It’s New Years Day. The entire country is taking the day off.

Argh! That’s the whole point of having a website (which has now been abolished by ovo). This is the 21st century. I have been able to upload meter readings 24/7 for nearly 30 years. Now I am supposed to wait until “an agent becomes available”.

It’ll be back up for you soon. Most of the userbase on the old system got migrated to the new one some time ago, but your account was probably part of that 0.1% that requires manual action.

And there was also the SSE → OVO migration that was required to be done by 31st December 2023 without exception, because that was when the licensing/branding deal agreement expired. Part of the terms were that ALL legacy SSE systems had to be shut down by that date, which required OVO to really focus pretty hard on it.

With that basically wrapped up, OVO will be able to put more resources on finishing the Apollo → Orion migration which is the one you’re on.

Meh, more like 2,000 affected accounts out of 2 million that might have been on Apollo. You need to remember that several million of the accounts on OVO’s books have never touched the legacy Apollo system and were provisioned directly onto the new one Orion.

I also never said they’d be migrated manually. The manual action I alluded to is more about building out functionality into Orion to ensure feature parity to Apollo and unlock the migration path for those accounts. Once that’s in place, they’ll be migrated automatically just like all the others.

These things are complicated - you just have to be patient. To put it into context, the process of me just migrating 2GB worth of emails from my web server to Google Workspace a few months ago on behalf of a client took about 8 hours due to the sheer volume of emails in one of the mailboxes - and that’s with my web server being one of the fastest in the web hosting industry along with running the process at a maximum speed of 100 requests per second. And that was just for 10 email accounts and roughly 15,000 emails in total.

Try scaling that up by a couple of thousand more accounts… And you’ll soon see what I mean here.

@Hadders52 @MarkS1 @Frustrated and irate 

Have you ever put in official complaints?

https://www.ovoenergy.com/feedback

There are also some email links on the same page to contact the ovo ceo team.

You could also post a review on Trustpilot which can help highlight issues 

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.ovoenergy.com

Hi @Blastoise186, I’m sure this is all true but it’s not the customers’ problem. Other utility companies presumably upgrade their systems all the time but they don’t leave customers without esssential services.

It’s worth noting that OVO didn’t give us any notice of the website being shut down (about 9 months ago) and hasn’t provided any updates on the situation since. When I log in to the website now it still says “access to your online account won't be available until the end of 2023”.

Moreover, from what you said above, it sounds like only the oldest customers are affected by the “legacy” website. I switched to OVO in early 2016 because it was highly recommended (maybe by Which?) at that time. It’s no consolation to know that 99% of customers, including recent ones, are unaffected. That just makes it less likely that anyone will take this problem seriously.

When will the new website be ready? It was supposed to be online by end-2023

Q1 2024 is the current target, and one that I suspect will be met now that some other massive projects have been completed.

It’s becoming an absolute joke now.

None of the other big energy companies would be so passive in such an obviously flagging area of their day to day operations. I imagine it must be costing them more in phone calls/manual processing etc which makes it even more bizarre. Customer service operatives sound disinterested and abrupt when you mention the subject to them. Having to ring up for a bill (they don’t send them monthly) and being cut off during meter reading submission is always a favourite past time. 
 

I have a three phase meter, giving readings manually and via the chat and met with the same automated emails of Ovo being unable to process my meter readings and threatening to send operatives around to manually read the meter. This is despite the fact someone physically confirms they have processed your readings. 

I’ll give it until the end of January for the app to return and if not, I’ll be switching promptly. The next bit of fun I suspect I’ll get is having to retrieve the considerable amount of money I am in credit with them. 

Except maybe… British Gas? Who completely screwed up their migration to the new system and had to roll back, which affected 6k business customers.

And that’s before you count their domestic one - that hit even more customers.

Noted.

But 9+ months to be unable to perform some pretty basic functions is ridiculous. I feel like I’ve gone back 15 years in time.

It would be more tolerable if Ovo actually stuck to its statements on the migration update page - sending monthly statements, keep people better informed etc. I’ve done nothing but do all the chasing around with anything to do with my account. 

Kind of typical of OVO customer service, no email to tell us of the new deadline and the website still says end of 2023.

Who is in charge of Customer Success at this company?

We know who that person is, but that’s not someone you can talk to. See https://ovoenergy.com/feedback .

We’ve raised this internally @Denis543, I appreciate how frustrating this must be. 

Update TODAY from Laura- Ann on the OVO Trust Pilot Team - which means that OVO keep fobbing us off with dates to restore our on-line access but they DON’T HAVE A DATE!!

***UPDATE***

Thank you for providing those details, Mark.

I can understand not having access to your online account is frustrating.

I've contacted the team responsible for this for an update. We are experiencing some technical issues moving your account from our original billing system to our new one.

Until your account has been moved, you will not be able to access your online account. We don't have a timeframe for this at the moment unfortunately, I'm sorry you have been told it should be by the end of Q1, but we will be in touch as soon as you are able to get logged in.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience this has caused, if you'd like to discuss this further please contact the team using your preferred contact method in our Help Centre here: https://www.ovoenergy.com/help

Thanks,
Laura-Ann

👍 That’s also what I was told on Tuesday (2/1/24):

That’s an interesting case:

“Ofgem welcomes suppliers investing in new systems and recognises that this can be challenging. However the £9.5 million payment also sends a strong reminder to all energy companies that they must treat consumers fairly at all times, including while new systems are put in place.”

OVO obviously didn’t get that message because some customers (us) are being treated worse than others (in this respect).

I have lodged a complaint with the Energy Ombudsman -www.energyombudsman.org

Let’s put this into a different angle and step into my world for a second. As the Forum Moderators know, my background is in IT and Cybersecurity. This stuff is right up my street.

Would you rather have a rapid migration focused on speed - but then spend forever fixing all the car crashes - or a slower migration focused on quality where everything is tested and verified before anything gets shifted?

British Gas went for speed.

OVO went for quality.

I ALWAYS go for quality wherever possible.

Which would you pick? Please think about this very carefully before answering. Please bear in mind that the legacy Apollo billing system was falling apart anyway and keeping it going could have been even more detrimental than just turning it off.

I agree with quality over speed.
 

The issues I have are:

1. When the Directors of OVO took the decision to suspend online access they also made a decision not to communicate their decision to customers who only found out when they attempted to log on. 
2. When the Directors knew that online access would not be restored at the end of the year they made a decision not to inform customers.
3. A decision was then taken by the Directors to inform customers who were asking about their online access that it would be restored in Q1 2024. 
4. A decision was taken by the Directors this week to inform those customers who were told that their online access would be restored in Q1 that there is now no date when their online access will be restored. 

The Board of Directors of OVO Energy need to issue a public statement explaining their decisions and make a commitment to continually proactively inform customers when their online access will be restored. 

I think it’s very unlikely that this was a CEO, COO, CTO, CIO or even a CISO decision. This kind of thing hardly ever falls under the remit of anyone in the C-Suite. It’s more likely to have been Team Leader or Head of Department level stuff.

Some of the questions I ask are designed to reveal more information than the question itself may appear to ask for. This is by design because it sometimes allows me to extract information that’s not obvious at first and dig into the details. Proves rather useful in some of my other roles. The last one I asked you was one of that type.

It is unlikely the C-Suite would have been directly monitoring progress nor calling the shots.

Sometimes, you also have to pull the plug sooner than you want to. Apollo was falling apart and OVO was struggling for many years with it being unreliable, which was one of the big reasons why Orion is scratch built in-house by OVO’s sister company Kaluza - it gives OVO Group full control over the code rather than relying on some random third-party and trusting their word.

There is also the factor of the SSE to OVO Migration protect - which for complicated legal reasons HAD to be done by the end of 31st December 2023 without exception, which was when the licensing agreement to use the SSE name and branding expired. The Apollo to Orion Migration has no such legally binding condition attached to it and ultimately planned schedules are just predictions - not hard and fast rules.

I performed an email migration a few months ago for the media company I’m part of. Two different source systems with the destination being Google Workspace. Pretty easy to do, one was from Zoho Mail, the other my web server. I started with my web server first as that was the more crucial one, simply had to set up the Google Workspace Data Migration Service tool, plug in a few details and press go… And then waited six hours for the biggest of the 10 accounts to migrate automatically. Easy! I was even able to add more accounts on the fly - just plugging in the details for each account and hit add, which kicked off the ingest for those ones too without interrupting any others.

Zoho… Was an absolute nightmare, despite being just two accounts. Long story short, I had to hack the super admin account, flip super admin to me and then run migration. For just two users, it took 12 hours for far less mail. And I could only run the job for one migration source at a time.

The process for doing Apollo to Orion is just like that… Except multiplied by 1+ million or so accounts, except far more complicated, far more critical and (for the most part) far more automated.

I think progress will speed up from here and the Forum Volunteers - myself included - will be making sure we get timely progress updates whenever possible.

Apollo is gone, so you can’t ask to have your online access to that turned back on because there’ll be nothing to link it to.

Thank you for explaining in detail the process of migrating Apollo to Orion.

If you are correct that the decision to suspend online access for 1+ million customers for an indefinite period of time was not approved by the Board and the Board are unaware of the current situation then Stephen Fitzpatrick, Founder, Raman Bhatia, CEO or Christina Scott, CTO, will be able to confirm this in a statement along with an apology.