Help with a calamity from switching gas/electric...
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Hi, was interested in hearing people's thoughts about next step to take forward in the below issue! It's one of those how on earth has it happened things.
In my previous property I was supplied by solarplicity for 9 months; thought they were ok. Took them up on a free lightbulb offer, someone came and inspected the house, noted down and ordered the bulbs for me, never arrived and they never had record of the visit. One of those things, but I forgot about it.
I moved into a property April 5th 2018. The old tenants were using EON for both gas/electric; I did some comparisons and thought solarplicity were fine based on the results, so; around 13th April, I instructed them to switch both. Just before this, I was told by solarplicity EON hadnt properly registered the property on the gas register. Spoke to EON, "yes, it is on the gas register I can confirm" so thought great, all sorted and good to go. The switch took place around start of May; gave them meter readings, got a "revised final bill" from EON end of May, paid it off, thought all is good.
However; when I came to give gas readings to solarplicity online at the weekend just gone, there was no clear option for gas. Found it eventually, clicked it, it said error please contact us. Recently, solarplicity have been getting hammered with customer service issues, so every new customer is assigned a specific customer service representative to contact in the event of any issues. I contacted mine at the weekend with the following email:
Hi, my customer reference is blahblahblahblah; I have been advised you are my customer champion.
I went onto my account to load my readings, but I can't actually do anything with gas - it has no estimated usage and when I click on gas it says to contact you.
I switched both fuels when I moved into my property start of April. No rush with this as it's just for readings, nothing more urgent.
Whilst I'm emailing; what are solarplicity doing with smart meters? I was hoping to get one installed next few months, but wanted to see the timeframe for this. I can work at home so weekdays are fine compared to most people.
Cheers!
The reply, lets just say, was less than impressive, for someone who is regarded as a 'customer champion':
Good morning Mr Turner and many thanks for your email.
You are currently still supplied by E.On regarding your Gas.
When you first applied to us, a rejection was issued due to an error in the application.
It transpired that the error was noticed and we have tried to put this right, but I can see that was has been attempted is probably incomplete.
I will speak to our Data Management Team today to try to resolve the issue more expediently, however, this may result in the need for you to re-apply for your Gas to be switched.
The error seems to be with the address that the industry holds for you for Gas, which is incomplete and is therefore not compatible with what we have, but I think that ours is also incomplete as well.
Eh??? My gas is still with Eon? So I replied straight away:
Hi Blah, that's really annoying - EOn confirmed that they had the correct info for the gas and there shouldn't be any issues. I've never heard that my gas wasn't supplied by Solarplicity or there was an error in switching, this is the first time hearing it? Doesn't seem that great.
I've not got an account with EON anymore, i paid off a balance in full for end of April around mid-May and have never had any further bills, so one would assume they don't believe they are supplying gas to me anymore.
I am the resident of Flat 1 I can confirm.
(Appreciate this isn't your fault and someone else not properly doing their job) Cheers
Blah didn't seem too bothered by this literally being the first time EVER I was being told my gas was not supplied by solarplcity. Not by EON, not by solarplicity. From the gist of my email, I think he was saying someone should have sorted it, or contacted me, but as of yet they hadn't got round to it:
Hi again Mr Turner.
If you ask E.On to check Xoserve which is the industry web portal, they will find that they do still supply your Gas and will have to bill you further (until this issue is resolved) and they will also see that the address held on Xoserve is incomplete, regardless of what they hold for you themselves.
Basically saying, nothing to do with us (despite us telling you we now supplied your property, and the fact we havent bothered to tell you there is an issue).
So what have I done since this time? I've contacted EON on twitter, who confirmed they still are supplying gas to my property. I've currently got a message sent 8am this morning that hasn't been responded to that apparently my address data isn't complete so could they sort it.
Wondering what I should do going forward? Obviously with EON I'm on a standard tariff, and with solarplicity I have been paying £37 a month towards my account balance (appreciate it's probably building credit) but I would assume I'm going to get a slightly higher bill as I'm on EON standard tariff; not to mention this is wasting quite a lot of my time (need to be revising for accountancy exams!) and I was meant to get a dual fuel bill discount with solarplicity, who knows what is going on with that. Is this something for solarplicity to fix, or something for EON? To make matters more confusing EON sent me an "electricity bill" yesterday for £11, then today a new electricity bill for £0.00, followed by a "new revised final bill for £13". Seems like their billing system has no idea either.
Hope someone has a laugh out of this, any advice in terms of ensuring I'm not out of pocket and compensated for waste of time would be appreciated.
In my previous property I was supplied by solarplicity for 9 months; thought they were ok. Took them up on a free lightbulb offer, someone came and inspected the house, noted down and ordered the bulbs for me, never arrived and they never had record of the visit. One of those things, but I forgot about it.
I moved into a property April 5th 2018. The old tenants were using EON for both gas/electric; I did some comparisons and thought solarplicity were fine based on the results, so; around 13th April, I instructed them to switch both. Just before this, I was told by solarplicity EON hadnt properly registered the property on the gas register. Spoke to EON, "yes, it is on the gas register I can confirm" so thought great, all sorted and good to go. The switch took place around start of May; gave them meter readings, got a "revised final bill" from EON end of May, paid it off, thought all is good.
However; when I came to give gas readings to solarplicity online at the weekend just gone, there was no clear option for gas. Found it eventually, clicked it, it said error please contact us. Recently, solarplicity have been getting hammered with customer service issues, so every new customer is assigned a specific customer service representative to contact in the event of any issues. I contacted mine at the weekend with the following email:
Hi, my customer reference is blahblahblahblah; I have been advised you are my customer champion.
I went onto my account to load my readings, but I can't actually do anything with gas - it has no estimated usage and when I click on gas it says to contact you.
I switched both fuels when I moved into my property start of April. No rush with this as it's just for readings, nothing more urgent.
Whilst I'm emailing; what are solarplicity doing with smart meters? I was hoping to get one installed next few months, but wanted to see the timeframe for this. I can work at home so weekdays are fine compared to most people.
Cheers!
The reply, lets just say, was less than impressive, for someone who is regarded as a 'customer champion':
Good morning Mr Turner and many thanks for your email.
You are currently still supplied by E.On regarding your Gas.
When you first applied to us, a rejection was issued due to an error in the application.
It transpired that the error was noticed and we have tried to put this right, but I can see that was has been attempted is probably incomplete.
I will speak to our Data Management Team today to try to resolve the issue more expediently, however, this may result in the need for you to re-apply for your Gas to be switched.
The error seems to be with the address that the industry holds for you for Gas, which is incomplete and is therefore not compatible with what we have, but I think that ours is also incomplete as well.
Eh??? My gas is still with Eon? So I replied straight away:
Hi Blah, that's really annoying - EOn confirmed that they had the correct info for the gas and there shouldn't be any issues. I've never heard that my gas wasn't supplied by Solarplicity or there was an error in switching, this is the first time hearing it? Doesn't seem that great.
I've not got an account with EON anymore, i paid off a balance in full for end of April around mid-May and have never had any further bills, so one would assume they don't believe they are supplying gas to me anymore.
I am the resident of Flat 1 I can confirm.
(Appreciate this isn't your fault and someone else not properly doing their job) Cheers
Blah didn't seem too bothered by this literally being the first time EVER I was being told my gas was not supplied by solarplcity. Not by EON, not by solarplicity. From the gist of my email, I think he was saying someone should have sorted it, or contacted me, but as of yet they hadn't got round to it:
Hi again Mr Turner.
If you ask E.On to check Xoserve which is the industry web portal, they will find that they do still supply your Gas and will have to bill you further (until this issue is resolved) and they will also see that the address held on Xoserve is incomplete, regardless of what they hold for you themselves.
Basically saying, nothing to do with us (despite us telling you we now supplied your property, and the fact we havent bothered to tell you there is an issue).
So what have I done since this time? I've contacted EON on twitter, who confirmed they still are supplying gas to my property. I've currently got a message sent 8am this morning that hasn't been responded to that apparently my address data isn't complete so could they sort it.
Wondering what I should do going forward? Obviously with EON I'm on a standard tariff, and with solarplicity I have been paying £37 a month towards my account balance (appreciate it's probably building credit) but I would assume I'm going to get a slightly higher bill as I'm on EON standard tariff; not to mention this is wasting quite a lot of my time (need to be revising for accountancy exams!) and I was meant to get a dual fuel bill discount with solarplicity, who knows what is going on with that. Is this something for solarplicity to fix, or something for EON? To make matters more confusing EON sent me an "electricity bill" yesterday for £11, then today a new electricity bill for £0.00, followed by a "new revised final bill for £13". Seems like their billing system has no idea either.
Hope someone has a laugh out of this, any advice in terms of ensuring I'm not out of pocket and compensated for waste of time would be appreciated.
0
Comments
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Hiya,
It's (unfortunately) not all that uncommon for the national database (Xoserve being the national database for Gas, Ecoes being the national database for electricity) to not have been kept up to date. Bits of incorrect / missing info are usually the reason for switch rejections and other problems. Basically, if there are discrepancies between the data on the database and what solarplicity have submitted when they try to register for supply, the switch will not go through (or sometimes the switch goes through but for the wrong meter). It's obviously not great that they didn't tell you about this though!
The good news is that the discrepancies on Xoserve can be rectified - but only by the current Gas supplier.
So ideally Eon need to fill in the relevent form and send it off to Xoserve to update whatever bits of info are missing (I am guessing perhaps the address/postcode?) before Solarplicity can re-apply for the Gas switch you. If Eon insist Xoserve is correct, I'd ask for a screenshot!
I suspect if you go through the complaints route the Eon staff member that you hear from will be able to see and sort this relatively quickly for you (though Xoserve updates can take a fews weeks). I'm not sure whether the the people working on the online chat and in the call centre for Eon would necessarily have access to Xoserve. So they may have just been looking on their own system when you contacted them initially, which may well have looked correct in terms of the address.
You could consider starting off by making a complaint to both Eon and to Solarplicity, purely on the basis that if they then haven't resolved it you can take it to the ombudsman after 8 weeks of the initial date of the complaint.
In terms of recompense, once you've switched to solarplicity it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to work out the savings you've missed out on by not switching in May as expected, and then to credit this to your account. You'll need to send them your tariff rates with Eon and a reading from when you should have switched, and then also when you do switch for them to be able to calculate this.
Some of the above is just guess-work of course based on what you've said, but hope it's helpful none-the-less.
Best of luck getting it resolved!0 -
Morning mturner93,
I'm sorry that you've had such a poor time trying to switch suppliers.
You've done the right thing in contacting us, as the current supplier we need to get the information up to date and correct on the national database.
I would suggest keeing up the current conversation you have on Twitter, you can DM as well as we'll need your details.
From there they can look in to what's going on and let you know what needs to happen next.
We will be able to [FONT="]arrange[/FONT] to see what the incorrect information is, then get the correct information sent off to have the database updated, so you can switch supplier.
You can also ask about the electricity bills that you've received. Do the start read and our final read match? Does this current bill say revised? We should be able to see why you've had a bill, as you say the electricity should be closed.
As missmaybesaver says, you can raise a complaint. If you're not happy with the resolution or how it's handled [FONT="]ask for it to be referred to our Complaints Review section. They'll look again at what's gone before from both your point of view and ours. At this stage, if you're still unhappy with what's happened, you can go to the Energy Ombudsman for an independent assessment. The Ombudsman's decision is binding on us but not on you. Our Reviewers will let you have a Final Resolution Offer letter to help when you go to the Ombudsman.
Thank you
Helena
[/FONT]“Official Company Representative
I am an official company representative of E.ON. MSE has given permission for me to post in response to queries about the company, so that I can help solve issues. You can see my name on the companies with permission to post list. I am not allowed to tout for business at all. If you believe I am please report it to forumteam@moneysavingexpert.com This does NOT imply any form of approval of my company or its products by MSE"0
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