Big problem with Eon bill, re price capping

Eighthours

Unfortunately my wife and I have a major problem with Eon that their call centre is being remarkably unhelpful with.

In a nutshell, we switched to Eon around a year ago at the very end of their Price Cap advertising campaign. My wife (then my fiancee) tried to switch suppliers on uSwitch but the website crashed due to demand, then on Eon's website, which was also swamped and crashed. Finally she rang Eon's call centre to switch, managed to get through, and everything seemed fine. She was assured on the phone that we would be on the capped price.

We got married this May, and so for months and months beforehand, we were exceptionally busy with wedding preparations. Unfortunately we didn't check our online bills in the meantime - the direct debit was coming out of our account at £60 a month and so we had no reason to suspect a problem...

...until we received a letter from Eon yesterday, to say that our direct debit was increasing to over £150 a month and that we had a large balance (over £400) owing on our account!

My wife went online to check our account, only to discover that we had, in fact, NOT been on the price cap at all, and our charges had been increased several times without our knowledge. (Now, I realise that we should have monitored the account, but due to everything going on in our lives, we didn't.)

Eon now refuse even to acknowledge that the initial call took place, effectively accusing my wife of lying. We signed up in good faith, believing what we were told, and are now faced with a bill of over £400 plus an absolutely ridiculous increase in the level of direct debit.

Any balance we do actually owe for electricity used over and above the direct debit taken, we will gladly pay, but it should surely be recalculated on the level of the cap and so should the direct debit. The call centre has basically said "tough", as they have no record of the initial call. As the call was made from our company offices, we will be able to find an itemised record of the call and how long it was for, but I was wondering what opinions people have about our next move...

Should we submit a written complaint in the first instance? How do we get this situation sorted? How do we prevent Eon from taking this extra money? Is there a way to "freeze" any increase in changes on the account until the complaint is resolved?

I note that there is an Eon representative on this forum, so I would also appreciate her advice, as the call centre was very unhelpful, inflexible and not even mildly understanding. I'm very disappointed in the company's reaction, to be perfectly honest.

E.ON_Company_Representative

Hi Eighthours,

Hope I can be of some assistance; my female colleague is off today!

Firstly, the actions of the agent that took your Wife’s original call around a year ago will show on the account. This means we should be able to see exactly who did the quote and sale and what tariff it was for.

The issue you face now is it’s your word against ours in terms of what was said in the original call, as you say there is no way to clarify this.

The problem I see here is, when you sign up for as a new customer we send you documentation through the post to layout the details of the plan you’ve joined. This includes tariff and payment details.

So in effect E.ON will look at this and say you had the opportunity immediately after joining to check everything was correct and in order. And you had essentially ‘got what you asked for’.

This is a tricky situation to be in and if you feel the query is unanswered definitely follow the complaint process (on the bill reverse), this will put a hold on everything and the Direct Debit stopped from being taken whilst this is disputed.

Brian