MSE News: IT bug at Ovo Energy means 13,000 customer bills were wrong

Mealyn

I am one of the customers that failed to get an electicity bill from August and have this January received a bill. In October I received an email that I had been wrongly charged for my electricity. I also don't know if they are correct or not, no way of checking. This is there explanation -
("The rates you signed up to aren’t the ones you’ve been paying so your account credit balance has ended up too high. This means a one-off transaction of £31.63 will be debited from your OVO account balance. ")
The difference in your rates

For your electricity, you should have been paying:

• Unit price: £0.1053p
• Standing charge: £0.2740p .

Instead, you were charged:

• Unit price: £0.0901p
• Standing charge: £0.2001p

Based on your usage between 10 April 2014 and 12 August 2014 the difference is: £31.63
Still did not get any bills until this January 2015. Then I noticed that the reading I gave for the elec account was recorded on the bill but not the reading for the gas on the gas bill. Recorded as estimated. So I emailed them with a query about this and the response I received was part a generalised explanation from a generated letter and the rest of it was badly spelled or miss typed with a lot of grammatical errors. All I could make out was that it was another glitch in their systems. However receiving such an illiterate type of email gives me grave concerns as to who they are employing in their customers service department. They then sent me a questionnaire on how they had done! I gave then a 1 and an explanation but have heard nothing since. I was so appalled at it I have erased the email and now wish I hadn't. But I will see what happens for February. At this time I am not sure about staying with them once my year is up.
It seems to me that OVO received more customers than they could actually handle and this is reflected in these problems that many of us new customers have encounted. Not good enough really.

Thehud

I have just sent an email to OVO asking them to re calculate all my payments. They charged me a gas bill covering the whole summer and an electicity bill for the same period. However they have been taking gas every month. It's a right mess and as far as I can see they are over by at least 25% on gas. Not done electricity yet. We had a very good summer and the heating was not on, however we still seem to have racked up the same amount that we normally do over the winter months.

So even if they do drop prices by 10% it will take one heck of a long time to recover the over pricing during the summer.