Flux from April?

mmmmikey

Octopus reponse to my email:

"I can confirm that you have followed all the necessary steps to onboard onto the flux tariff, at the moment the flux export tariff has a waiting list and will take between 4-6 weeks to go live, at that time you will receive an automated email confirmation."

I have responded as follows:

"This is not something I can accept and will lead to addtional costs for me because you have changed my import tariff from Agile to Flux in advance of changing the export tariff, when it is clear that the two are designed to go hand in hand. There was no mention of a waiting list on your website when I requested the change, and had I been aware of this I would not have done so.

Specifically, I am now paying more for my imports without getting the benefit of receiving more for my exports. Would you therefrore please do one of two things:

1. Put me back on the Agile tariff for imports until such time as you are able to swap both halves of the tariff at the same time.

or

2. Change my exports to Flux today. There is no reason this cannot be done immediately as you have all the information you need, and I know that another customer who I correspond with online via the moneysavingexpert energy forum requested the switch within a few hours of me doing so and was switched yesterday.

If you are unable to do either of these, please cancel the switch for the exports, leaving me on Outgoing Octopus Fixed and put me back on Agile for the imports.

In view of the delay in answering my previous email, could I ask you to action this immediately as I am currently incurring unnecessary additional costs.

If you are unable to do this, please let me know how I can raise this as a formal complaint."

I'll let you know what they say. Not a financial disaster but symptomatic of a general decline in Octopus communication and customer service that a few others have commented on. As long as they sort it no big deal but it does need sorting.

pensionpawn

I stayed on Flux throughout the autumn / winter as I didn't expect it to impact me much and come March I was only -£14 compared to moving to flat rate. Export from Oct - March inc came to £126

Officer_Dibble

Bad luck mmmmikey, I hope they come up with a better solution. Have you been on Flux before? I wonder if that makes a difference. I was with it last year, more or less from the day they invented it until switching to Agile for the winter, so perhaps that helped.

Officer_Dibble

Interestingly they've amended my bill after issuing it to give the Flux export payments from the same date as the switch to Flux import. Very decent of them. Again I don't if this is because I've been on Flux before so setting it up was straightforward.

ecraig

mmmmikey said:

Octopus reponse to my email:

"I can confirm that you have followed all the necessary steps to onboard onto the flux tariff, at the moment the flux export tariff has a waiting list and will take between 4-6 weeks to go live, at that time you will receive an automated email confirmation."

I have responded as follows:

"This is not something I can accept and will lead to addtional costs for me because you have changed my import tariff from Agile to Flux in advance of changing the export tariff, when it is clear that the two are designed to go hand in hand. There was no mention of a waiting list on your website when I requested the change, and had I been aware of this I would not have done so.

Specifically, I am now paying more for my imports without getting the benefit of receiving more for my exports. Would you therefrore please do one of two things:

1. Put me back on the Agile tariff for imports until such time as you are able to swap both halves of the tariff at the same time.

or

2. Change my exports to Flux today. There is no reason this cannot be done immediately as you have all the information you need, and I know that another customer who I correspond with online via the moneysavingexpert energy forum requested the switch within a few hours of me doing so and was switched yesterday.

If you are unable to do either of these, please cancel the switch for the exports, leaving me on Outgoing Octopus Fixed and put me back on Agile for the imports.

In view of the delay in answering my previous email, could I ask you to action this immediately as I am currently incurring unnecessary additional costs.

If you are unable to do this, please let me know how I can raise this as a formal complaint."

I'll let you know what they say. Not a financial disaster but symptomatic of a general decline in Octopus communication and customer service that a few others have commented on. As long as they sort it no big deal but it does need sorting.

If I were you… I would join X/twitter you’re not already a member, and contact Octopus through there instead.

if you’ve emailed that reply you probably won’t see a reply from them for a week or so.

Based on my experience of their email lead time they are slooooow. 

mmmmikey

Well, they've completed the change to Flux. Had a standard email from the complaints team saying they were looking into it.

This whole email / Twitter thing irks me. If you advertise that email is as good as any other way to contact you but that isn't true then I would say that is extremely bad customer service, a point others have made before. I don't have a Twitter account and it annoys me that I need to create one and get my head around using it for the sole purpose of communicating with an organisation who say I don't need to.

Being a pragmatist at heart I'll create the account and see if I get more responsive service that way.in future.

But I won't be recommending Octopus to anyone on the basis of their customer service unless they get back to where they were. My line will be that they used to be good but they no longer seem to be any better or worse than anyone else.

They do have a range of innovative and money saving tariffs which is good reason to change. The catch is that the complexity of those tariffs makes the need to access customer service more likely.

To finish on a more positive note, I still have the impression that Octopus are striving to offer a good service (just not always succeeding). And it's hardly their fault that they caught me when I'm generally grumpy as a result of lack of sleep while I enjoy one of life's simple pleasures - passing kidney stones - ouch :-)

mmmmikey

Hi - does anyone know the product code (i.e. the FLUX-IMPORT-23-02-14 bit in the link below) for the current Flux rates?

I can get the pre-increase rates from the API using:

https://api.octopus.energy/v1/products/FLUX-IMPORT-23-02-14/electricity-tariffs/E-1R-FLUX-IMPORT-23-02-14-C/standard-unit-rates/?period_from=2024-04-12T00:00Z&period_to=2024-04-14T00:00Z

But if I try FLUX-IMPORT-24-04-01 it doesn't work and I can't find a new code by querying the current tarriffs with the API.

Thanks, Mike