Green reviews: add your feedback

thelight

Has anyone else had an email asking them to top up to get 10% ontop of the top up back?

I'm not sure I quite understand the principle as I am not on a pre-payment tariff and just pay by direct debit

GreenSupplierLtd

thelight said:

Has anyone else had an email asking them to top up to get 10% ontop of the top up back?

I'm not sure I quite understand the principle as I am not on a pre-payment tariff and just pay by direct debit

Hi There, 
Following on from Blue Monday on the 18th January, we launched Green Monday to add some happiness to our members lives. From launch we have always allowed our members to top up their account even when paying via direct debit if they felt like it. From the 25th until midnight of the 26th January 2021, anyone who tops up online via our web portal or App will receive 10% of that top-up back as a credit in their Green account. T&Cs apply but you can find those on the email or text sent to yourself.

simondm

I've received "the offer" too, and it has been extended for another day. The T&C's do not explain what will happen to your DD. If they were to recalculate it immediately on receipt of the top-up, and then recalculate it again when they apply the 10% bonus it would make sense, but as there is no mention of this I suspect it would wait until your annual review, leading to you having a credit balance.
The whole offer leads me to think the company is failing and desperate for cashflow (this will be the third company in a row I've switched to that has), otherwise they could have just reduced their variable tariffs to benefit customers.

GreenSupplierLtd

simondm said:

I've received "the offer" too, and it has been extended for another day. The T&C's do not explain what will happen to your DD. If they were to recalculate it immediately on receipt of the top-up, and then recalculate it again when they apply the 10% bonus it would make sense, but as there is no mention of this I suspect it would wait until your annual review, leading to you having a credit balance.
The whole offer leads me to think the company is failing and desperate for cashflow (this will be the third company in a row I've switched to that has), otherwise they could have just reduced their variable tariffs to benefit customers.

Hi Simon,

Here at Green, we wanted to give something back to our members and during these times when a lot of people have fallen behind on their energy bills with increased usage from being at home and uncertainty regarding peoples jobs, we wanted to do our bit for all of our members.

If we reduced our variable tariffs this wouldn't help the majority of our members who are on fixed tariffs, which we couldn't legally alter. Whilst this was designed for people who had fallen behind on their energy bills and to help make their money go further, we have chosen to have this open to all of our members to be as fair as possible. 

This is of course 100% optional and up to each individual member of Green to decide if they want to take part so please don't feel obligated to do so. 

As part of the terms and conditions, we do make it clear that a regular direct debit needs to be in place but if you think your direct debit is too high or low, you can simply give us a call on 0345 222 2525, between 7am and 11pm, 7 days a week to discuss this with one of our team. All we ask is for a recent meter reading to ensure your account is as up to date as possible.

I hope this helps, 
The Team at Green

UnclaimedEnergy

It's also a lot easier getting cash-loans from customers instead of investors. Any extra credit added to a customers account is just picked up by the new supplier if they go bust so very little risk for them doing this.

Most suppliers are currently struggling financially due to covid-19 and the increase in wholesale and apart from the large suppliers, most are likely a month away from going bust if something bad happens due to such a short cash margin.

At least with Green, you're getting this risk backed up by great service and when they do try to get a cash injection, they do it as a benefit for the customer (extra credit), as oppose to Symbio who just increase everyone's estimated usage to bring in extra cash.

jaskal

I've recently switched to Green (from Bulb) and have been live with them for a few weeks now so thought I'd take advantage of this thread to share my experience.

The switch itself went smoothly. I was able to access my account via the website and app a couple of days after applying, and Green communicated well throughout the process (confirming the application, confirming acceptance and that the switch is being processed, requesting meter readings, and then confirming the switch had completed). My account with my previous supplier (Bulb) showed the opening gas reading within a couple of days and the opening electricity reading a couple of weeks later, so everything correct and as expected and I've already received my final bill and refund from them. So no issues in that regard.

There have been a few issues I have noticed though:

1. Less than a week after switching, they increased the prices on my tariff (Aspen). I fully appreciate that I selected a variable tariff so I'm not challenging them on their right to increase prices (especially given the increase in wholesale gas and electricity prices) and they do provide 30 days notice before the increase takes effect, but I think they could have avoided a bit of negative publicity on this by applying a grace period to new customer accounts of at least a month or two before changing their tariffs (a great deal of the negative reviews around this price increase seem to be from people like me that switched only days / week prior to receiving notice of the increase). That being said, even with the increase, they are still the cheapest supplier available to me right now, so I'm not really upset about it.
   
2. On the website, there is an obvious bug whereby on the meter readings page, where it's meant to show your most recent gas and electricity reading, it's actually showing the oldest meter reading you have on your account instead. Being a software engineer myself I dug into the JavaScript and underlying API's that drives the website and underlying and found that it's clearly a bug where they are sorting your meter readings in the wrong direction (oldest first instead of newest first) and then grabbing the first reading from the list.
   
3. My next billing date in both the website and app is showing the date my supply with Green went live, instead of a date in the future (i.e. a month from when my supply went live). Again, digging into the JavaScript of the website, it looks like the value they use here is actually the registration date of your supply returned by their underlying API (i.e. the date they took over your supply). Unless I've misunderstood the nature of the data their underlying API is returning, I don't see how this value could ever change or ever have been right, so not quite sure if this is a bug in their app / website or an issue on my account.
   

Customer service thus far seems OK. Green advertise 7am to 11pm phone service and 24/7 chat service and are clearly trying to position themselves as a custom service orientated supplier (one of the reasons I switched to them was that they are ranked first on Citizen Advice's league table for domestic energy supplier custom service). When I rang the phone service to submit my opening meter readings in the evening a few days before my go-live date, the phone was answered within seconds and the readings were taken without issue - no problems there.

The problems seem to be around email and live chat. The way they work the live chat in particular is a bit odd - your chat begins almost immediately, but there can be long gaps between receiving a response from an agent and sometimes the agent you're talking to switches midway through a conversation. It appears that their agents are juggling many conversations simultaneously and their chat system is attempting to balance the number of chats any single agent is juggling by switching you to a different agent half way through a conversation. Odd.

In terms of email, I did send them an email a couple of weeks ago and received a response fairly quickly (emailed around 11pm in the evening, received a reply 8am next day, all subsequent responses within an hour). But more recently I sent an email a couple of days ago regarding (3) above to try and understand whether this is an issue on my account or a bug in their website / app / API, I have not yet received any response (except the automated confirmation email with a ticket number). This is in contrast to the first email I sent them which was responded to very quickly, so not sure why there's been a sudden decline in response times in only a couple of weeks.

One thing I would like to see is, given that Green market themselves as a tech focused energy supplier, some form of communication with developers would be nice (public GitHub or issue tracker for example). They have a rich, publicly available API, but the public documentation on it is quite limited making it difficult to use it directly, and it would be good to be able to raise technical questions / apparent bugs directly with the engineering team.

Overall I'm quite happy with green so far (notwithstanding the few small issues noted above which I hope will be resolved eventually) and would recommend them.

GreenSupplierLtd

jaskal said:

I've recently switched to Green (from Bulb) and have been live with them for a few weeks now so thought I'd take advantage of this thread to share my experience.

The switch itself went smoothly. I was able to access my account via the website and app a couple of days after applying, and Green communicated well throughout the process (confirming the application, confirming acceptance and that the switch is being processed, requesting meter readings, and then confirming the switch had completed). My account with my previous supplier (Bulb) showed the opening gas reading within a couple of days and the opening electricity reading a couple of weeks later, so everything correct and as expected and I've already received my final bill and refund from them. So no issues in that regard.

There have been a few issues I have noticed though:

1. Less than a week after switching, they increased the prices on my tariff (Aspen). I fully appreciate that I selected a variable tariff so I'm not challenging them on their right to increase prices (especially given the increase in wholesale gas and electricity prices) and they do provide 30 days notice before the increase takes effect, but I think they could have avoided a bit of negative publicity on this by applying a grace period to new customer accounts of at least a month or two before changing their tariffs (a great deal of the negative reviews around this price increase seem to be from people like me that switched only days / week prior to receiving notice of the increase). That being said, even with the increase, they are still the cheapest supplier available to me right now, so I'm not really upset about it.
   
2. On the website, there is an obvious bug whereby on the meter readings page, where it's meant to show your most recent gas and electricity reading, it's actually showing the oldest meter reading you have on your account instead. Being a software engineer myself I dug into the JavaScript and underlying API's that drives the website and underlying and found that it's clearly a bug where they are sorting your meter readings in the wrong direction (oldest first instead of newest first) and then grabbing the first reading from the list.
   
3. My next billing date in both the website and app is showing the date my supply with Green went live, instead of a date in the future (i.e. a month from when my supply went live). Again, digging into the JavaScript of the website, it looks like the value they use here is actually the registration date of your supply returned by their underlying API (i.e. the date they took over your supply). Unless I've misunderstood the nature of the data their underlying API is returning, I don't see how this value could ever change or ever have been right, so not quite sure if this is a bug in their app / website or an issue on my account.
   

Customer service thus far seems OK. Green advertise 7am to 11pm phone service and 24/7 chat service and are clearly trying to position themselves as a custom service orientated supplier (one of the reasons I switched to them was that they are ranked first on Citizen Advice's league table for domestic energy supplier custom service). When I rang the phone service to submit my opening meter readings in the evening a few days before my go-live date, the phone was answered within seconds and the readings were taken without issue - no problems there.

The problems seem to be around email and live chat. The way they work the live chat in particular is a bit odd - your chat begins almost immediately, but there can be long gaps between receiving a response from an agent and sometimes the agent you're talking to switches midway through a conversation. It appears that their agents are juggling many conversations simultaneously and their chat system is attempting to balance the number of chats any single agent is juggling by switching you to a different agent half way through a conversation. Odd.

In terms of email, I did send them an email a couple of weeks ago and received a response fairly quickly (emailed around 11pm in the evening, received a reply 8am next day, all subsequent responses within an hour). But more recently I sent an email a couple of days ago regarding (3) above to try and understand whether this is an issue on my account or a bug in their website / app / API, I have not yet received any response (except the automated confirmation email with a ticket number). This is in contrast to the first email I sent them which was responded to very quickly, so not sure why there's been a sudden decline in response times in only a couple of weeks.

One thing I would like to see is, given that Green market themselves as a tech focused energy supplier, some form of communication with developers would be nice (public GitHub or issue tracker for example). They have a rich, publicly available API, but the public documentation on it is quite limited making it difficult to use it directly, and it would be good to be able to raise technical questions / apparent bugs directly with the engineering team.

Overall I'm quite happy with green so far (notwithstanding the few small issues noted above which I hope will be resolved eventually) and would recommend them.

Hi Jaskal, 
Thanks for the post and its great to have you onboard. It is always very helpful to get feedback from our members about how they find Green. 

In regard to your 3 points, 
1) Changing our variable tariff is not something we like doing, but due to extreme changes in the wholesale market we had to reflect this in some of our variable tariffs. This being said, we always provide at least 30 days notice of any change so you can choose to stay on the same tariff, switch to another tariff with Green or switch to a new supplier and not incur the price change. We hope we can reduce our tariffs in the future when the wholesale market allows it.
In regard to number 2 and 3, I have raised this to our development team, can you drop an email to bugs@green.energy and our dev team can look into your account specifically. 

It's amazing you have experienced great customer service over the phone, and i would like to apologise for any delay via email or livechat, we have seen a large influx with the launch of our Green Monday promotion and response times have slipped from where we want them to be, but we are working to get this back as soon as possible.

In regard to Green being tech focused, we are currently in the process of launching our publicly available tech roadmap where our tech team and members can discuss and check progress on updates and bugs. In the meantime, members can email ideas@green.energy or bugs@green.energy for any queries they may have. Our V3 API has just launched in the past few months and we are accepting all feedback on the API and documentation, we have passed this information on to the tech team to fill out the documentation further to help assist our API users.

I hope this helps,
The Team at Green

redlakes

Been with Green since Jan 2020 on oak variable tariff. The switch went fine. It has consistently been the cheapest. The rates rise in early Feb 2021,but crunching the numbers, even on variable tariff with no exit fees, it is still cheapest. They have offered 10% credit on a top up to the account, and that will help too, payable in 60 days from 27/01/21. I have had no problems all year, meter read every month with a reminder. Bill produced a couple of days later. The direct debit based on actual kW use over a year has proved to be accurate from month one, and has not changed, up to the current increase in price in Feb. The app works but could improve.

A happy year, and a cheap one!

MrsShazbat

I switched to Green last September and to begin with my readings didn’t appear to have been registered in my account despite me submitting them on time, so it was a shock when they wanted to increase our monthly payment from the quoted £50 to £150.

Despite us both being at home - me working - we haven’t had the heating or shower on any more than normal apart from a handful of times when it snowed recently and then it might only have been on an extra hour.
I negotiated them down to £75 although I’m still not thrilled, and looking at our bill online following our most recent reading the amount we’re in debit by has more or less doubled. 
I find the app a bit hit and miss, a few features seem to be “coming soon” but email responses and telephone customer service have been good so far.

Korkyb

I got an email yesterday advising the 10% top up offer for adding credit has been extended to the end of today (1st Feb).

Given the current situation I also wonder if this is entirely altruistic.

If I did top up my account & the company went under does anyone know what might happen to my credit? Would the protection that covers credit though normal overpaying still stand for credit added in this fashion?

10% is almost 10% more than I'm getting for my dosh in my savings account!