Octopus Energy not anwering their emails

visi

As you may know, Octopus have always had a reputation for good customer service and speedy responses to emails.  Which is one of the reasons I signed up over a year ago.  However, they are not responding to emails and they are not sending me the usual monthly reminder for a meter reading.  On investigating their fb page, I found that I am not the only one.  Are they about to go bust?

worrywart_3

They are just in the process of taking over bulb which more than doubles their size so doubt it, I do worry that will impact customer service but I think it’s being run as a subsidiary so probably keeping bulb staff separate 

MattMattMattUK

The technical side of the Bulb takover/merger/integration has hot started yet, the deal was only signed on Friday. The customer service departments are swamped at the moment with tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people contacting them about bill rises, the £66 payments, other random pointless calls and emails etc.

Do they actually need a monthly meter reading from you and if they do, do they need to send you an email rather than reminding you on their site or in their app?

[Deleted User]

No, they are not going bust.

They are massively busy with tens of thousands of unnecessary calls and emails to their customer services department.

Don’t panic about a slow email response that isn’t really affecting your life.

Alnat1

I emailed them on Thursday and got a response on Saturday.

If your message was only to ask "why haven't you messaged me to ask for readings* then it's probably low priority.

If you know you need to give the readings then do it. Better still, get smart meters so you don't need to. 

[Deleted User]

The CTO of Octopus has acknowledged on another forum that CS response times are a challenge and it is something that the executive team is concentrating on. Customers should not have to resort to Twitter to get a response. Fear generates uncertainty, and suppliers need to be responsive to increased consumer CS demands. 

In the days before I got my smart meters, I recall that each time a manual reading was entered into the system a statement was generated. Has this changed?

username

That system has not changed, although, I have had quite a few instances where I have had lower than expected usage or something on the gas side that has held up the reading. I'm not sure if this some sort of anti-cheat algorithm kicking in, and it gets reviewed by a person and goes through?! Does anyone else get this?

I think we should be thankful that we can actually contact Octopus via email, and that a real person responds to it.

Many other companies leave you hanging on the telephone or have removed emails a way for contact, instead insisting you use social media or end up talking to an automated chat robot and not a person.

You can tell these from the real people as the responses are cookie cutter and they don't understand if you phrase something in a way it isn't programmed to respond.

The government has not helped with allowing energy companies to apply EBSS inconsistently - it should have been one size fits all in terms of how it was applied and then there wouldn't have been any confusion. One message, everyone singing from the same hymnsheet.

[Deleted User]

username said:

The government has not helped with allowing energy companies to apply EBSS inconsistently - it should have been one size fits all in terms of how it was applied and then there wouldn't have been any confusion. One message, everyone singing from the same hymnsheet.

I guess that the issue here is that not all supplier billing systems are equal. I recall asking EDF earlier this year why all adjustments made to a bill were in just a single line entry: I was told that is a limitation that CS staff and customers have to live with!

Chrysalis

visi said:

As you may know, Octopus have always had a reputation for good customer service and speedy responses to emails.  Which is one of the reasons I signed up over a year ago.  However, they are not responding to emails and they are not sending me the usual monthly reminder for a meter reading.  On investigating their fb page, I found that I am not the only one.  Are they about to go bust?

Their good rep only seems to come from a few people on MSE, I think since they became a SOLR they have been pretty bad.

I have a lot of stories not just from myself but also from others I know in trying to deal with Octopus, and they are one of the worst companies I have seen in terms of staff training, getting responses, and how they have loads of teams that are not customer facing etc.

Good smart meter policies, but poor customer service.

How this will be after the bulb acquisition I dont know, dread to think.

They are a wealthy company, wont be going bust, its just they growing faster then they can handle.

Jeff_Dee

Well until recently I've had superb customer service from them both on email and via telephone support. So I hope the current email woes are just temporary and caused by exceptional demand as others have pointed out.

QrizB

Chrysalis said:

visi said:

As you may know, Octopus have always had a reputation for good customer service and speedy responses to emails.  Which is one of the reasons I signed up over a year ago.  However, they are not responding to emails and they are not sending me the usual monthly reminder for a meter reading.  On investigating their fb page, I found that I am not the only one.  Are they about to go bust?

Their good rep only seems to come from a few people on MSE, I think since they became a SOLR they have been pretty bad.

I have to agree. Over the past six months there's been little evidence of their allegedly-great customer service.

Even their smart meter team seem to have fallen by the wayside. I've had a problem with my gas smart meter not reporting readings since before joining Octopus. Front-line CS couldn't do anything about it and referred to to the specialist team in June(or thereabouts). I heard nothing back despite chasing and so emailed their complaints address a couple of weeks ago. That got a reply last week but whoever replied hadn't read my email and tried to fob me off with claiming it was a SMETS1 DCC issue. (Reader, my meters are SMETS2.)

They also said they couldn't investigate further without my account number, bit the number was at the top of my email ...

Their platform is much better than any others I've had recently, and they have some good innovative tariffs, but their customer service is currently nothing special.