This is a feed of the latest reviews in Switch Supplier on TheUKHighStreet.com. http://www.theukhighstreet.com/rss/rss_catreviews_231 Sun, 19 Mar 2006 12:00:00 GMT http://www.theukhighstreet.com/images/tinylogo.jpg http://www.theukhighstreet.com/rss/rss_catreviews_231 UK High Street Shops and Services 120 60 I work for powergen and I can assure you working in a call centre is hardly an upper-class job, but we do our best to help you out. We are one of the cheapest energy companies in the market at the moment and way cheaper than British Gas, any fool can see this, I don't think you give us in the customer service/sales call centres enough credit, we literally sit and wait for people such as yourselves to call us and moan, do you not think we haven't heard it all before? Probably more times than you can imagine, I also think it is unfair you metion the India Call Centre, lots of companies especially ones that operate through the use of call centres employ their staff via the India Call centres, Capital One being one of them, it is a cheap and effective way of branching out and expanding the employees needed to be "on call" for the ever growing amount of customers switching to Powergen. If we had less customers we would need less call centres and would eliminate the India Call Centre all together. http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2331 http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2331 Sun, 19 Mar 2006 12:00:00 GMT £700+ taken from my bank account by Powergen on 20th August 2005. I did not owe them this money but they decided to take it. If you like large multinational companies taking large amounts of money out of your bank account for no reason then Powergen is the one; if however, you want to use a reliable efficient service then look elsewhere! Please spare yourselves the time, MONEY and effort by using a different gas/electricity supplier! http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2240 http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2240 Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:00:00 GMT moved to powergen thinking i'll save money, but since last march i've not been billed for my gas, several phonecalls later i'm still waiting. advised my account has been suspended which they cannot answer why! they emailed me to advise my account will be sorted, still no such luck, rung them up to be informed there computer has my bill reading but they can't send it?!?!? why, because its stuck in the system! my advise to everyone don't go for cheap you get want you pay for. http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2245 http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2245 Fri, 14 Oct 2005 12:00:00 GMT Oh the problems! The Problems! It all started when I received a bill for £554 from NPower for my small 1 bed apartment that up until then cost me maybe £25 a month. I wasnt with NPower, I was with Powergen and I pointed this out to NPower. They apologised, went away, and then came back with a demand for £554 or they will take me to Court. I contacted Energywatch who immediately took up the case and discovered that NPower were charging me for my neighbours meter. They checked the MPAN number on the bill and it was definately my neighbours. I spoke with my neighbour who confirmed that he did use NPower but that he paid his bills up and he showed me. Shortly after he told me NPower had come to him for the £554 and he had told them it was not his bill. They apologised and went away. Next Bill I receive from Powergen shows me going from £44 in credit where I pay by Direct Debit, to £550 in debit where all of a sudden Powergen "discover" an unpaid amount that I should pay. I took immediate issue. I got no where. The next bill I received was for £224 for the quarter. One bedroom apartment remember. This shows that I used storage heaters. Let me explain something. I dont have any working storage heaters and I do not heat a water tank. I have a dishwasher, washing machine and electric shower that provide their own heating for water. I point this out and am practically called a liar by Powergen in not so many words. I invite an inspection, they refuse. I ask for an engineer, they refuse. Over the next nine months in my small one bedroom apartment I rack up bills close to £850 in electric. I have bills that continue to show storage heaters, and when I tell Powergen I have none, they respond, but you spend more in winter. The intellect is awesome. I complain again to Energywatch. Even they seem to have given up now! As a comparison, my sister lives in the same set of flats and pays £55 a quarter. I eventually get a check meter fitted, but where do they place it? At the meter. Where does it need to go? After my fusebox where the supply enters my flat. I got so frustrated at one point, I rang the Tesco Clubcard helpdesk section of Powergen by mistake, as they are in partnership with Powergen. They managed to look at the system and told me (and I quote this verbatim) "Sorry Sir, I can see why you have been given the runaround, you have been dealing with the Call Centre in India and they are not equipped to handle your type of query". He offered to speak to a Manager here and get one to call me back. Sure enough he rings me and tells me that I will get a call back within the hour from a Manager. That was at least 6 months ago. Im still waiting. So, how do Powergen deal with this finally? Well they snuck in one night, removed the meter, fitted a key meter and didnt leave a key. They left a note saying one would be sent through the post. I didnt get one. I contacted energywatch. They contacted Powergen and were told a key will be put in the post that night without fail. 3 days later, its apparent they lied to Energywatch. I have no money on the meter, Im into the emergency fiver and the nearest paypoint is a 25 minute walk from me. Eventually I am told to walk the 25 minutes and I can get a key at the Paypoint shop. Its been there all along and they dont know why I wasnt told this. As a last ditch attempt to pacify me over the £850 in charges that I cant possibly have racked up in just less than a year they offer me £44 off my next bill as a gesture of goodwill. To Summarise: Powergen 0/10 1) They buy other peoples accounts I guess 2) They have terrible customer service that wont call back 3) They have ill equipped Indian Call Centres who do not know how to escalate a complaint to a department that can deal with it 4) They lie to Energywatch 5) They fail to recognise when they are at fault. 6) They have no idea what a gesture of goodwill is 7) Even Energywatch give up trying to get sense out of them 8) They exchange your meter without even letting you know they will do this, then leave you without a key to top it up until you are in the Emergency funds. This is not an exhaustive list. MY ADVICE: AVOID AT ALL COSTS! http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2149 http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2149 Thu, 07 Apr 2005 12:00:00 GMT Just don't go there! I switched to Powergen a year ago and have not received a clear, accurate bill for my gas and electricity yet! It's not worth it - save yourselves! http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2145 http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=2145 Mon, 04 Apr 2005 12:00:00 GMT I am currently having some problems with over-eager debt collectors, and it’s Powergen’s fault. Late 2001, I was living with a friend at a rented flat in Stirling. One evening, a salesman for Powergen came to the door. As is normal, we were told that by changing our electricity supplier we could save a substantial amount of money (we were on a Powercard meter). As we felt we were paying quite a lot for the electricity on the flat, we agreed, and the supplier was changed over to Powergen then and there. I was given a contract to sign, and signed it. Admittedly at this point I made an error of judgement by not reading the contract, but just giving it a cursory glance over. While I obviously regret this now, I feel that having a salesman sitting waiting on you to sign does not encourage an in-depth reading of a complicated contract. I also felt that because we were on an electricity meter, the worst thing that could happen was that we would pay slightly more for power than we had been. To be honest, this was about the third time in about two months that we had changed electricity suppliers – every time a salesman came to the door, either myself or my flatmate would change our provider! However, as the electricity was paid for by Powercards, it made no real difference to us who got the money at the end of the day – we would continue buying Powercards from the newsagent across the street. (As an aside, not one of the suppliers actually seemed to save us any money.) As the salesman was getting ready to go he asked us if we were with BT. We said that we were. The salesman then said that because BT’s electricity was provided by Powergen, BT offered Powergen customers a discount on their phone calls. All we had to do was to plug a box into the phone line. He gave us an adaptor, which plugged into the phone, and the wall socket, then left. At no point did the salesman ask us what kind of tariff we were paying with BT, or any other information. The box was pulled from his pocket, and came with no documentation whatsoever. We received in the post a welcome pack from Powergen; this made no mention of the telephone box. I had plugged the box into one junction box of one of the phones, and pretty much forgot about it. When the next BT bill came, it was not noticeably cheaper and said nothing about Powergen discounts, so I unplugged the box. When I received a bill from Wescott Credit Services a couple of months ago asking for immediate payment of £115, I was surprised, as I had made sure that all the bills had been paid before I left the flat. My wife and I are now starting to look for a mortgage, and while my credit history has been less than exemplary in the past, I have been trying hard to improve my credit rating, by paying bills promptly. When I phoned Wescott, they said that the bill was from non-payment of a Powergen bill. I immediately looked out my final bill from Npower (our gas supplier), which showed that the bill had been settled. As the electricity was metered, and the gas bill had been paid, I assumed that Powergen had made a mistake, probably due to our regularly changing utility companies. When I phoned Powergen however I was told that the bill was for telephone services. I argued with the Powergen call-centre employee that at no point had I ever received telephone services from Powergen, I had always been a BT customer. It took a couple of minutes for the call-centre employee to mentioned the box that was plugged into the telephone, at which point it dawned on me what the bill was for. I immediately looked out my BT bills for the period, to find that we had been receiving bills from BT – including call charges. With the call-centre employee, I worked out that there could be one of two scenarios: A I had been charged twice for calls made. B I had been charged by BT for those calls made from the phone which did not have the box plugged in, and by Powergen for those calls which were made from the phone where the box was plugged in. While I believe that scenario B is the more probable of the two, it was agreed that we should try to exclude scenario A as soon as possible. To this end I contacted BT and made arrangements with them to provide a bill for the period in question. Powergen also agreed to send a bill (which, in their favour, arrived promptly). BT however claimed they were having difficulty due to viruses disrupting their system, and then trying to get the bill from microfilm. Despite phoning BT weekly to check the bill’s progress, it has still not been sent. Powergen agreed to inform Wescott that I was dealing with the matter. Despite also telling Wescott this myself, I continued to receive phone calls more than once a week from staff at Wescott, who presumably considered me to be trying to delay this matter. While no doubt it is Wescott’s duty as the “attack dogs” of large corporations to chase up those in debt, I have made it quite clear to them that I was not attempting to flee, or delay the bill, but were involved in a dispute over the bill with Powergen. Despite telling Wescott again and again that I was waiting on information from BT, they continued to harass us with phone calls, and threats of legal action. Powergen seemed to fail to inform Wescott that I had got in touch with the organ grinder rather than the monkey. The main disagreement however is that I do not believe that I owe Powergen any money whatsoever. As far as I am concerned, the method used by the salesman to get us to plug in the box is tantamount to fraud. Assuming that I have not paid for the phone calls already in our BT bill, I would have no hesitation in paying BT for these calls, I am however refusing to pay Powergen, who could be considered to be stealing from BT. The tariff I was on with BT at the time was an inclusive package, where the majority of call charges were included in the cost of the package, effectively meaning, that when I plugged the Powergen box in, rather than saving money, I ended up paying for calls that BT would have provided for free. Also, with the salesman only providing one box, I had another phone in the house which was not covered by Powergen. At no point did the salesman say that I would receive a bill from them – I was led to believe that I would simply be getting a discount on my regular BT bill. I received no letter of confirmation, or telephone call from Powergen saying that they were now providing my telephone services. The salesman did not at any point explain how the box worked. This has been very distressing for me. I can’t help thinking that this has no doubt severely affected my credit rating over the past year. The way that both Powergen and Wescott have handled can only be described as petty – I hardly think waiting another few weeks to resolve this is going to leave the CEO's children shoeless and hungry. Rather than allowing time for this to be sorted in a reasonable manner, they have resorted to scare tactics, despite my best efforts to keep them informed of what was going on. This morning I received a letter informing me that I am being taken to court in 7 days unless I pay. I refuse to pay Powergen a penny. I have tried to resolve this with Powergen, whose best effort so far is to offer £20 off the bill as a goodwill gesture! So far I have spent about 2-3 hours on the phone to Powergen speaking to some of the most incompetent, ignorant, badly trained and unhelpful staff I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Avoid this company at all costs. http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=1488 http://www.theukhighstreet.com/perl/review.cgi?ReviewID=1488 Fri, 17 Oct 2003 12:00:00 GMT