Octopus Tracker

masonic

Doc_N said:

masonic said:

Doc_N said:

Meanwhile, the mysterious Tracker waiting list continues, allegedly still at 6 months. I wonder what the actual wait time might be. I hear and see different stories.

All it will take is a temporary price spike and the list will evaporate quite quickly.

They’re now talking about the list being in excess of 6 months, and seem to be using it as a lever to get new customers onto their other tariffs with a sort of vague half promise they they might at some point in the future deign to allow you to switch to Tracker. So if you don’t switch to their standard tariff you get nowhere. But if you do, you may well also get nowhere.

Have to say that my dealings with Octopus suggest a chaotic, unresponsive company chasing customers - very far from the image its CEO likes to project. Wondering now just how stable it actually is, after all the new customers, and how close it is to a lot of bad PR.

I don't understand the stance they have taken with respect to keeping the tariff pseudo-available. It's clearly causing a lot of negative sentiment and if I were in their shoes, I'd have turned it into a historic tariff when the deluge started. Problem solved!

I can't say I share your poor customer service experiences. I've had good experiences throughout the period of growing pains, from the absorption of Avro, then Bulb, then this latest deluge of HUKD folk. Only last week I received a prompt, detailed and thoughtful response to a quite complicated set of questions while probing my renewal options. Whether Octopus can keep its CS from plummeting to the levels of a typical big supplier as it grows I don't know, but I see little sign of that thus far.

bristolleedsfan

Someone joined twitter this month, first tweet - me me me 

https://twitter.com/KevHines246841/status/1645857573948588033

masonic

bristolleedsfan said:

Someone joined twitter this month, first tweet - me me me 

https://twitter.com/KevHines246841/status/1645857573948588033

That's at least one of the nicer ones. Some have been very abusive. It's really been quite disappointing to see what lengths some will go to either to attempt to jump the queue themselves, or tall tales on others who claim to have done so.

Doc_N

It really shouldn’t be necessary to have to resort to social media to get a response from any company though.

masonic

Doc_N said:

It really shouldn’t be necessary to have to resort to social media to get a response from any company though.

It isn't necessary, but emails and transcripts of phonecalls aren't published, so when citing from the internet, it will be the social media responses that people will find. For non-time sensitive matters I usually email them, and would phone if it was something urgent (but the social media team is usually really fast, so might go that route if phoning was less convenient).

In the above case, the individual has probably already been told they have to wait via more conventional channels and is trying it on in the hope that the social media team will feel more pressured to acquiesce in a public forum. Good to see them standing firm.

Qyburn

Doc_N said:

It really shouldn’t be necessary to have to resort to social media to get a response from any company though.

You think the supplier should be obliged to put you onto a loss making tariff RIGHT AWAY?

Doc_N

Qyburn said:

Doc_N said:

It really shouldn’t be necessary to have to resort to social media to get a response from any company though.

You think the supplier should be obliged to put you onto a loss making tariff RIGHT AWAY?

What on earth makes you think it's a loss making tariff? It's calculated on a cost+ basis and pretty much guaranteed to be profitable. 

masonic

This is the part that I simply cannot fathom. Suppose that it is loss-making as Octopus has claimed. It has been consistently lower than the average Agile rate, so not implausible that this is the case, and there have been good explanations earlier in the thread about the true cost to Octopus. A number of fixed costs are added to the wholesale rate to arrive at the unit rate and these may require adjustment.

It is within their power to adjust the formula to address this. It is completely normal for a supplier to adjust a tariff to reflect changes to underlying costs. So to a large extent this is a problem of their own making. If they didn't want to adjust the tariff, they could move it to their historic tariffs list and phase it out. Evidently it is not doing them any good running a waitlist and offering the tariff to 50 people a day. It simply isn't worth the aggravation of all of these disgruntled customers, some of which seem to be on a campaign of hostility due to their wait.

Qyburn

Doc_N said:

Qyburn said:

Doc_N said:

It really shouldn’t be necessary to have to resort to social media to get a response from any company though.

You think the supplier should be obliged to put you onto a loss making tariff RIGHT AWAY?

What on earth makes you think it's a loss making tariff? It's calculated on a cost+ basis and pretty much guaranteed to be profitable. 

Octopus have said so, and it's quoted earlier in one of these threads. Looking  logically, each kWh that a tracker customer paid 18p for, could have been sold for 31p plus a government subsidy of 17p or whatever the actual figures are.

Doc_N

masonic said:

This is the part that I simply cannot fathom. Suppose that it is loss-making as Octopus has claimed. It has been consistently lower than the average Agile rate, so not implausible that this is the case, and there have been good explanations earlier in the thread about the true cost to Octopus. A number of fixed costs are added to the wholesale rate to arrive at the unit rate and these may require adjustment.

It is within their power to adjust the formula to address this. It is completely normal for a supplier to adjust a tariff to reflect changes to underlying costs. So to a large extent this is a problem of their own making. If they didn't want to adjust the tariff, they could move it to their historic tariffs list and phase it out. Evidently it is not doing them any good running a waitlist and offering the tariff to 50 people a day. It simply isn't worth the aggravation of all of these disgruntled customers, some of which seem to be on a campaign of hostility due to their wait.

Firstly, I just don't accept any claim that it's a loss maker.  But secondly, they now appear to be using it as a means of luring new customers into their standard tariffs on a half-promise that they might at some point be moved to the Tracker - or indeed might not.  Such practices have very questionable legality.