E.ON Cashback Surprise/EDF-no fixed tarriff!

Paulee

In this mornings post I received a rather strange letter from E.ON telling me that when I left them 12 months ago I was not allowed my normal discount on their final bill. They told me that they don't give discounts on the final bill when the account has been closed, but they felt that they should have made this clearer to me, they were sorry and would like to give me £47.04!

Well, after I managed to get back onto my chair, re-read the letter and decided that it wasn't another Nigerian scam, I phoned them up and spoke to a very helpful lady. She confirmed that it was all genuine and agreed with me that it was rather unusual, these days, for an energy company to be giving something away, particularly to an ex. customer who had no idea that he had been shortchanged in the first place!!! A cheque is in the post.

She also advised me to visit Energyhelpline.com to check that my current supplier (edf) was still competitive but, more importantly, to see who was giving the best deal on capped or fixed energy contracts. She told me that it was most important that I did this IMMEADIATELY and certainly before this Friday as existing offers would be withdrawn and prices were certainly going up. She did quote the 40% figure we are hearing so much about.

I have now checked out my current supplier on the comparison sites (I found the sites even more confusing than normal to make sense of) and it appears to me that edf are still competitive, but I couldn't find any useful information on capped supplies. I then phoned up edf, having discovered from their website that their fixed tarrifs had been withdrawn a couple of weeks ago. They were polite, but pretty well useless when asked what they could do to help me and to prevent me from switching to a cheaper supplier. I have checked out, but been uninspired by, the alternative suppliers fixed schemes and I really don't see what I can do now, other than pay whatever increases the energy cartel decides to charge me!

Any advice, as always, gratefully received.

wakeupalarm

I find the energyhelpline site very good and well laid out. When you do the comparision the capped/fixed rate deals are at the bottom of the results page.

Unfortunatley most of the longer deals have now been withdrawn with the longest being until the end of 2009.

Premier_2

I got all the discounts I was normally entitled to on my final bill - but then mine was calculated by the MD's office as CS made a complete shambles of billing me initially.

I'm surprised an energy company would recommend you check out a comparison site - not only would the supplier have to pay the comparison site their agreed referral fee for switching through them, the salesperson lose any commission for signing you up themselves (if available) but they very well might be driving a potential customer towards a competitor supplier.

Mind you I've heard similar in all fields - some sales people need to remember who pays their wages at the end of the month!

Paulee

Hi Premier, I'm a bit surprised by your comments about the CS person I spoke to at E.ON. I formed the opinion the lady I spoke to was a very nice person who was being friendly and helpful to me - another very nice person! I had already told her that I was happy with edf and was not looking to move back to E.ON.

BTW, she was from Yorkshire. I'm led to believe that Yorkshire folk have a habit of saying what they think, not what they're told to think!

Grolsch30

Hi,

I must say E.ON's customer service is one if not the best I have come across.

I phoned them up in regards to changing from my energy online saver 5 to a capped tariff either V15 or V2 the only difference being you are tied in until OCT 2009 on the V2 with a free energy monitor worth £40. The prices are the same.

Anyway because I had only been with them since April the computer system could not tell me what the bottom line would be changing over.

So she manually took the time and calculated everything for me.
Before I phoned I read on another thread on here that the V15 tariff was to be pulled at midnight tonight which I mentioned to her.
She replied by saying that she did not know of this and left it at that.

After about an hour she rang me and confirmed to me that the capped tariff was being pulled and advised me to act by midnight if I wanted to change to one of the capped tariffs.

Now she did not have to do that!

So I am very satisfied with them but still none the wiser wether to cap or not as it would automatically mean a £20 per month rise approx and energy prices would need to increase by a minimum of 20% for it to pay off for me!

5 hours left and counting!!

Cheers now

20vt-rs

Go for the v15 with no tie in, if you really want an energy monitor you can get them on Ebay for a tenner!!!

Premier_2

£70 cashback with quidco until July 4th!