Eon!

padadan

20% is alot when you dont earn much money and got eon not compromising and helping the situation. they just want as much as they can get from me. My debt will keep rising with them unless i do one of two things

1. get cheaper electric supplier (sainsburys)
2. just sit in the dark and not have electric untill i pay them back

i don't understand why people aren't seeing the situation, yes i sound a little angered and hostile but i simply dont think its fair to keep someone in a financial circle i cant afford until they free me. How will figures help this situation? i need EON to say "your right sir, you wont be able to pay this off with the amount we r charging u per month, lets compromise and come to a deal you can afford and we get our money" i would be so behind that but thats not the case is it, bully boys, want every cent of my money and seem to have a gaggle of supporters to help the bully boys, fascist bully boys.

modsandmockers

The OP is the forum’s newest contributor who has got lost in the fog of the incomplete/misleading information which the suppliers provide (or fail to provide) when you switch to them.

1 - customers are not made sufficiently aware that, unlike days gone by, it is their own responsibility to provide regular (preferably monthly) meter readings so that their bills can be accurately calculated. Lots and lots of customers mistakenly assume that the energy supplier will somehow know how much energy they have used. What actually happens is that, in the absence of customer-supplied meter readings, the suppliers take a guess which can be, and often is, wildly inaccurate (the suppliers call it an estimate). Can you imagine any other retail business operating on such a basis - supermarkets, petrol stations, phone companies etc?

2 - customers are given the impression that the monthly direct debit payment is a reliable representation of their actual energy costs and that, by signing up to a monthly payment plan, they can rely on the energy company to do all the necessary sums. This is not true - the monthly direct debit payment is just another guess which can be, and often is, wildly inaccurate. And the inaccuracy of the monthly payment routinely allows the customer’s account to accumulate large debits or credits which frequently run into 100s and 100s of £££s. Many customers make no distinction between their monthly payment plan and their quarterly bills, and the suppliers make very little effort to explain the difference.

Many customers genuinely do not have the necessary skills of arithmetic which would enable them to keep a proper track of their energy costs. They have no choice but to rely on the suppliers but the suppliers are, to put it mildly, institutionally unreliable. Organisations like MSE keep repeating the ‘Switch to Save’ mantra but for many (possibly most) people the prospect of switching threatens to create nothing but another unfathomable experience of errors, delays, incompetence and non-existent levels of customer service.

Shrimply

padadan wrote: »

20% is alot when you dont earn much money and got eon not compromising and helping the situation. they just want as much as they can get from me. My debt will keep rising with them unless i do one of two things

I'd guess from the figures you have given it's about a tenner a month which is worth saving if you can but it's not the huge amount you are making it out to be, and £10 a month is not going to be enough to clear your debt with Eon in a hurry.

modsandmockers wrote: »

The OP is the forum’s newest contributor who has got lost in the fog of the incomplete/misleading information which the suppliers provide (or fail to provide) when you switch to them.

I don't really see why the suppliers are to blame to the extent you make out, it maybe isn't perfect but they do ask for meter readings. And you don't need any arithmetic skills to quickly goggle about paying energy bills and to find out you should be regularly submitting meter readings. Anybody who is paying for anything should do some research about it, I'm not sure if this applies to the OP or not, but I don't have any sympathy for people who pay for anything without thinking about it or doing the most basic research when they are capable of doing so.

modsandmockers

Shrimply - the point is that many people simply take the marketing at face value. If the energy supplier tells the customer that £75 a month will cover their energy costs, then why would they feel the need to do any further checks? This forum is regularly hit with people who have fallen into the same trap - they pay what they are asked to pay - that’s what they do everywhere else (supermarkets, petrol stations, phone companies etc) and the energy suppliers make no serious attempt to explain that energy retailing is on a completely different planet.

The problem for the likes of you and me is that once the energy suppliers have allowed these massive debts to accumulate it is common for the debt to end up being sold to a debt collector at a tiny fraction of their true value. So who then picks up the tab? Answer - the likes of you and me.

The problem for the likes of the OP is that, because they believed that the energy supplier had accepted the management of their account (and therefore willingly paid everything that the supplier asked them to pay), they finish up with a wrecked credit history. Eon, like all the others in similar scenarios, could very easily have prevented the OP’s situation from occurring by applying normal business diligence to the level of their customer’s debit balance.

Cardew

padadan wrote: »

Hello all,

I'm looking for a bit of advice on how to deal with EON energy.


Anyway, we requested to switch to sanisburys on a fixed rate of £70 something a month for gas and electric.

---

---Eon said no! you arent going anywhere, we will put you on a fixed rate of £140 a month......


All we want to do is go to sainburys for both gas and electric at the £70 something a month and pay eon a bit each month to clear the debt with them but were stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Firstly there will be no 'fixed rate of £xx' All firms will lure you in with an attractive INITIAL low Direct Debit, but it will be increased quickly to cover your usage and cover any arrears which have built up.


You may be willing(and able?) to pay off the debt after you leave a company. However if people could leave a company owing a large amount, many people would simply move from company to company leaving a trail of debts behind them.

Shrimply

Modsandmockers, I guess I see what you are saying. I find it hard to blame the energy companies when all the information is there if you are prepared to look I guess. They could be more clear, but I also don't think it's that difficult to find relevant information.

Cardew wrote: »

Firstly there will be no 'fixed rate of £xx' All firms will lure you in with an attractive INITIAL low Direct Debit, but it will be increased quickly to cover your usage and cover any arrears which have built up.

I recently switched to E.on. I told them how much energy I used last year, they worked out how much that would cost me on the new tariff and divided it by 12. I don't understand how that is luring people with a low rate. How much more accurate can they make the prediction?

Cardew

modsandmockers wrote: »

Eon, like all the others in similar scenarios, could very easily have prevented the OP’s situation from occurring by applying normal business diligence to the level of their customer’s debit balance.

Agree totally with your post; however the culprit here is whoever(Sainsburys? a comparison website? MSE? someone touting in a shop?) told the OP that Sainsburys would only cost a fixed £70 a month.


We have commission driven employees in a multi £millions industry chasing customers. If Eon used 'due diligence' in selecting customers and set their DD at a reasonable level, they wouldn't get any customers like the OP!

Cardew

Shrimply wrote: »

I recently switched to E.on. I told them how much energy I used last year, they worked out how much that would cost me on the new tariff and divided it by 12. I don't understand how that is luring people with a low rate. How much more accurate can they make the prediction?

Many people(like I suspect the OP) have no idea how much energy they use in a year. Their 'reference point' is how much they pay by DD each month. If the DD is initially set too low, a debt accrues and the DD increases and they believe huge(and unrealistic) savings are to be made by switching.


As for luring in customers. Ring any comparison site or energy company, pretending to have no idea about energy prices and tell them you are paying, say, £150 a month. After a couple of perfunctory questions I guarantee you will be offered a reduction in the monthly DD to, say, £120 monthly.


Repeat the process time and again with different sites/firms and you will easily get the DD down to, say £50 monthly. What a saving!

[Deleted User]

Shrimply wrote: »

Modsandmockers, I guess I see what you are saying. I find it hard to blame the energy companies when all the information is there if you are prepared to look I guess. They could be more clear, but I also don't think it's that difficult to find relevant information.



I recently switched to E.on. I told them how much energy I used last year, they worked out how much that would cost me on the new tariff and divided it by 12. I don't understand how that is luring people with a low rate. How much more accurate can they make the prediction?

Excellent post by modsandmockers. I d go a bit further and say that the suppliers sit back and won t attempt to educate customers in anything at all. I see it all the time happening with all manner of things, use of prepayment meters, economy 7 users with gas central heating,direct debits, , standard tariffs v fixed deals, confusing bills with vague terms like kwhr which most people I ll warrant have no idea of its meaning. We could do with some public information broadcasts which will help in at least understanding how one of their biggest priority bills work.They all seem to know how iphone 6/Facebook works but not an energy bill. Many people just dash off any old yearly usage figure to arrive at a cheaper monthly direct debit , thats one of the reasons why the force fitting of prepayment meters is commonplace.

BlueEyedGirl

padadan wrote: »

please excuse the grammar and spelling. I was typing so quickly and im really angry with them.

Please edit your first post and add some paragraphs!