E-ON not being helpful with resolving their mistake - help?

niktheguru

Send both a written letter, and an email including all the pictures of the meter as attachments (the emailed photos will have time stamps on them confirming the day it was taken for proof)
It is obvious that the meter should have read 42000.
There is absolutely no need for you to be worried/emotional/upset as this is an easy case. You will not be expected to pay thousands. As has been said you can probably seek a bit of compensation yourself (like 30-60quid) for the hassle.

Now write the letter, keep emotion and comorbidities out of it, just stick to the facts, state you are extremely unhappy at the delay and frustration this has caused in getting this corrected when it is an obvious error.

Good luck.

Tallerdave

Adding to @niktheguru's above post, I think you’ll find several of the posters here willing to help with drafting/review of your letter to ensure it's concise, factual and easily digested.

And whilst it's easy to say, do try to relax and see this as just an admin muck up that is so obviously wrong that it will get sorted out. I once had a long battle with npower (now Eon) over a meter swap reading error. I knew I was right and they were wrong (I had a copy of the paperwork they'd lost), it just took time until they accepted they were wrong. I moved on and swore to never use npower ever again.

stewie_griffin

The quickest way to resolve it would probably to Google the email address for E.ONs CEO and send them an email outlining the facts and including the photos you have.

Hannimal

They've phoned me and said they'd be able to sort this for me today. I am waiting for them to phone me again. Thanks everyone for the replies.

Anyanka1

Good luck, Hannimal and please let us know the outcome, for all I think it must be a foregone conclusion.  Please ramp up the distress factor and extract every last penny you can in compensation because this appalling level of customer service is just not acceptable from any supplier, no matter how small.

[Deleted User]

Anyanka1 said:

Good luck, Hannimal and please let us know the outcome, for all I think it must be a foregone conclusion.  Please ramp up the distress factor and extract every last penny you can in compensation because this appalling level of customer service is just not acceptable from any supplier, no matter how small.

We shouldn’t forget that compensation is paid for by a supplier’s customers in the form of higher bills. As experts are now predicting that the average energy bill will increase by £115 or more in October, the last thing that we need is more supplier failures that we all end up paying for. Yes, errors need to be corrected and where there is blame there needs to be some financial redress,  but it needs to be proportionate. This was a simple error which I suspect is replicated by many consumers - not just meter installers- every day.

Hannimal

I didn't get any compensation but they did correct the bill. I am on a fix with them until September and will swiftly then change suppliers. 

Hannimal

[Deleted User] said:

Anyanka1 said:

Good luck, Hannimal and please let us know the outcome, for all I think it must be a foregone conclusion.  Please ramp up the distress factor and extract every last penny you can in compensation because this appalling level of customer service is just not acceptable from any supplier, no matter how small.

We shouldn’t forget that compensation is paid for by a supplier’s customers in the form of higher bills. As experts are now predicting that the average energy bill will increase by £115 or more in October, the last thing that we need is more supplier failures that we all end up paying for. Yes, errors need to be corrected and where there is blame there needs to be some financial redress,  but it needs to be proportionate. This was a simple error which I suspect is replicated by many consumers - not just meter installers- every day.

I don't know if you quite appreciate how distressing this was for me. That bill was the size of a house deposit in some parts of this country and initially they refused to fix it for me. I was having some very desperate thoughts as a result. I have a lot of anxiety about money anyway and I go to therapy and I am medicated for it. This wasn't just some numbers on a piece of paper,  it was actually very distressing. 

[Deleted User]

Hannimal said:

[Deleted User] said:

Anyanka1 said:

Good luck, Hannimal and please let us know the outcome, for all I think it must be a foregone conclusion.  Please ramp up the distress factor and extract every last penny you can in compensation because this appalling level of customer service is just not acceptable from any supplier, no matter how small.

We shouldn’t forget that compensation is paid for by a supplier’s customers in the form of higher bills. As experts are now predicting that the average energy bill will increase by £115 or more in October, the last thing that we need is more supplier failures that we all end up paying for. Yes, errors need to be corrected and where there is blame there needs to be some financial redress,  but it needs to be proportionate. This was a simple error which I suspect is replicated by many consumers - not just meter installers- every day.

I don't know if you quite appreciate how distressing this was for me. That bill was the size of a house deposit in some parts of this country and initially they refused to fix it for me. I was having some very desperate thoughts as a result. I have a lot of anxiety about money anyway and I go to therapy and I am medicated for it. This wasn't just some numbers on a piece of paper,  it was actually very distressing. 

I am not defending the supplier's actions nor am in a position to know what you said to the supplier or what was its initial response. Personally, when problems like this arise, I always want a paperwork trail. My point was that consumers should not expect to be paid vast sums of compensation for what was just a simple human error. Proving that there had been an error was a simple process for any consumer - it just needed a statement with an actual meter reading. That said, I accept that the person in CS could have been more helpful/proactive. Energy suppliers are though not alone in having poorly trained and unhelpful staff!

I know that people like to think that compensation payments come out of profits; sadly, they do not, they are seen as a cost of doing business and these costs are reflected in more expensive tariffs going forward. Bad debts alone put £23 on all our energy bills in April.

Anyanka1

All the more reason, Dolor, to extract compensation where you can, imho, if only to recoup some of the cost of compensation...