nPower Customer service - vent

My elderly mother in law is with nPower on a fixed until 2020 contract.

She just recieved her latest bill - she pays £76 per month on DD and is approx £25 in credit after the Summer & Autumn. Her bill said her DD is being raised to £101 with no explanation.

So she got confused & rang me in a panic - on Saturday night, I said I'd follow up with nPower. I can see that with cold weather her usage may go up but thought that a DD was designed to cover the whole year?

Sunday - their phones are closed but chatline is open - however despite trying all day (every 30 minutes or more) there was never a chat agent available
Monday - I got through to chat but all I got was a copy and paste of the website faq's
Tuesday - I spoke to someone who said the DD wouldn't change
Tuesday afternoon my MIL gets a call saying not £101 anymore, now £91 but still no explanation

If you need any customer service avoid nPower.

Comments

  • nPower
    nPower Posts: 1,319
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    Organisation Representative
    Hi Jon5,

    It sounds like your mother in law has recently had a payment reassessment, these take place every 6 months. If this is the case all details and calculations can be found on the latest bill. You'll also be able to get an idea of her predicted usage over the remainder of the year on the usage tab on her online account (if she has one).

    We are happy to look into this further if you can get in touch using our contact details on our page.

    Thanks :)
    Official Company Representative"
    I am the official company representative of nPower. 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.
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  • Has she / you given Npower regular monthly meter readings ??
  • she's 89 and can't do meter readings, npower made a mess of organising this too - but they are now being read every 3 months
  • Hasbeen
    Hasbeen Posts: 4,404
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    edited 23 February 2019 at 4:58PM
    Direct debit amount do not cover the whole year at the same price. They usually go up to cover winter months or where people rely only on estimated readings then get actual.


    Thing electric companies do not do regular readings. By law its every 2 years.
    The world is not ruined by the wickedness of the wicked, but by the weakness of the good. Napoleon
  • The problem is that nPower gave her no reason for the change - her immediate response was that they were putting the prices up - I then wasted a day with no chat available, an hour with a chatbot which regurgitated words from the web site, and finally was told the DD wasn't changing, followed by a email to say yes it was but to a new amount.

    I understand that the price changes in the winter - its the incompetent CS that i making me vent
  • pollypenny
    pollypenny Posts: 29,392
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    The idea of direct debits is to spread the cost over the year, surely?

    I've always found npower very easy to deal with.
    Member #14 of SKI-ers club

    Words, words, they're all we have to go by!.

    (Pity they are mangled by this autocorrect!)
  • hollydays
    hollydays Posts: 19,812
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    I telephone in my meter readings, even though they hate this,
  • Woolco
    Woolco Posts: 172 Forumite
    Hi. Have been with NPOWER and probably most of the others. It's just to say that the situation you describe is what happens with them all. Most frustrating though.
  • mac.d
    mac.d Posts: 1,344
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    jon5 wrote: »
    My elderly mother in law is with nPower on a fixed until 2020 contract.

    She just recieved her latest bill - she pays £76 per month on DD and is approx £25 in credit after the Summer & Autumn. Her bill said her DD is being raised to £101 with no explanation.

    Tuesday - I spoke to someone who said the DD wouldn't change
    Tuesday afternoon my MIL gets a call saying not £101 anymore, now £91 but still no explanation.
    If she is only £25 in credit after summer & autumn, they are raising the DD because she will likely fall into debt over the winter period still paying the same DD amount (if the DD amount has been set correctly to take account of your annual usage, you'd expect to be well in credit before the winter period).

    The amount of the increase in the DD may well be a surprise, but at least you phoning them has resulted in them lowering it slightly, so that's a good result.

    I don't think nPower are particularly well rated for customer service, but as Woolco has just said, phoning up about similar DD complaints to other energy suppliers can be just as frustrating.
    If regular meter readings have not been taken and bills are based on estimates, the computers that calculate your bills can get it wrong and when it then gets an actual reading, it sees you haven't paid enough and shoots the DD up too high, and when you speak to the CS they just go on what the computer tells them.
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