British Gas come through (for once!)

chemicalfan

I'll try to keep this story as brief as possible, it was a long one! I had a SSE prepayment electricity meter, and initiated a switch via uSwitch to British Gas mid-summer. There were various delays, starting with "me cancelling the switch" when I hadn't contacted them, then British Gas creating my account with no details, then a letter giving me an actual switch date, but no key for 3 weeks after that date despite numerous phone calls. Frustrating, but got there in the end.

So about a month ago, I decided to switch to a credit meter to make better deals available, and to spread the cost of electricity over the year to limit the effect of the peak of winter. Spent half an hour on the phone to a British Gas customer service bod (20 minutes of that was them putting me on hold), then I was cut off. I called back a couple of days later, only to be told I'd failed the credit check, but they couldn't tell me why, only that I needed to call Experian. Ended up having to sign up to Experian (will cancel very soon!), only to see that the idiot working for British Gas had entered the wrong address details (using an address I moved out of 11 months previously, where utilities were part of rent). My credit is actually very good, according to Experian. Called British Gas back, explained the whole thing to a helpful chap, who explained that he'd submitted the correction to their admin team, and it would take 2 weeks for them to sort it, then 4 weeks for Experian to update; I could then re-apply for a credit meter. This would have put it at mid-December, so I decided to write a long letter of complaint, as this was totally their admin error, and was going to cost me the better part of £40 (prepayment vs. monthly DD spreading cost).

After just over a week, got a call from their complaints team saying that the guy had reviewed the case, and agreed with me that there's no reason I should have failed the check, and he would arrange for a credit meter to be installed. He informed me that an engineer would be around the following day, which he was (very friendly chap too!). Even made my consumer unit safe, as it was missing a blank and had an exposed busbar (despite the fact that I've had 2 seperate electrical repairs done to my flat!). Very impressed!

TL;DR - after British Gas' shoddy treatment of a new customer culminating in a complaint, their complaints team actually saved the day and bent over backwards to help. With any luck, they'll use their complaints team to train their customer service team, as the quality of service delivered are polar opposites!!

Well done British Gas (in the end!)

Experian_company_representative

Glad you got it sorted!

James