Octopus FT artice

The Financial Times Lex column wrote about Octopus Energy yesterday. You can get the vibe from the headline if you can't get past the paywall

Octopus Energy: jamming tentacles throughout the energy value chain
https://on.ft.com/3sKvly0

I commented on the piece because I thought it unfairly downplayed the innovation that OE has brought to the market in the form of flexible tariffs that many of us are now benefiting from. Whenever I speak to people it always blows their mind what we can effectively achieve now in the UK. A British success story that should be celebrated - but instead we look for the opportunity to turn heroes into villains.

Octopus are bringing huge benefits to customers and are leaving the competition in the dust.

Innovative they are, but basic customer service is not what they would have us believe. They consistently fail to pay me my export when they agreed they would ( at the end of each month). Last paid in sept. Yes, when I prompt them they will, but why should I need to do that.

Customer service is a lot less good than it used to be, including staff not raising a complaint when you ask them to.

kram

I can vouch for that - I had to go via ombudsman in the end over an issue I had with them, and even after they raised an internal complaint they just sat on it with no responses using twitter and everything still didn't work, thus me having to go to Ofgem.

kram Ah, good it's not just me then? I have escalated my latest issue to "The manager" and will continue to escalate if they do not fix the issues.

My E7 does not always switch over at the correct time, At the start of November it stayed on standard tariff. Not helpful when I charged my car and home batteries and the 38 units were charged to the standard tariff.
I discover by 1) noting the standard meter reading before/after charging and 2) looking at IHD next morning- Surprised to see £15 when I expected about £5. I have previously raised this issue suspecting I was using more standard units that I expected. Their answer was to not use the full 7 hours, but to star/stop charging batteries an hour either side. i.e Economy 5 !! But this is not the issue. The meter is not receiving whatever signal to change over.

Anyway, 3 weeks on and still no reply from the manager.

Roberto Same here. Prompts needed monthly. My last prompt was five days ago, so far unanswered 🙁

That’s a bit sad as pre rolling in bulb I found them to be excellent.

Now it’s an occasional good advisor with far too many fobbing people off, being rude should you dare question their answer (solar export is apparently already paid by reduced import so they don’t need to pay me), not answering/saying something and not doing it.

I really hope they pull it back, but not sure how easy it will be with when there are so many that make you feel like you are talking to the big six in the early 2000’s.

kram They used to be head and shoulders above the rest but now just too busy it would seem. I still like their innovative approach and it's fair to say their tariffs mean my annual power bill is negative, but communication with them gets harder each time. Victim of success. Hopefully they can resolve it.

I've found that emails largely go unanswered, but calls are answered promptly and any issues dealt with first time by the first person that picks up the phone. I can't say that for my last few utility companies.

I find their Twitter/X team are always very responsive, but I still have to ask them every month to produce a bill on the 1st of month (even though they say it's set up to do so, it never happens).

Roberto
Same here. Up until I changed from Flux to IO in September, I would submit my SEG meter reading monthly and the credit would be on my account within 24 hrs. Since then, the credit takes a least a month to appear.

Agree that the twitter/X is very responsive. I got nowhere with sending emails to them, waited weeks for a reply that never came, but the twitter response is pretty good. Same experience with Eonnext, emails were completely ignored for months at a time but twitter messaging was much more responsive.

After being with Octopus since June they finally got round to billing me for my import last week. I'd been getting credits for the octopus powerups and the export, but not the import!
The bill was 50% right, 50% wrong. New agile charges were correct, flux export were correct, but the initial period of time when I joined they had billed me for Economy 7 with the night and day tariffs transposed and when I moved to flux import they'd billed me for 4 months of being on Economy 7.

Messaged them on twitter and they responded, rebilling the Flux import correctly the next day. Replies back about the night/day mixup which they are investigating.

Ive had nothing but positive interactions with them, and ive had a couple where ive had to chase/confirm/validate but generally great. And all over email. From what i can see no other provider comes close to what they are trying to offer and achieve.

OK kept the export going into credit on my account over the summer, rather than extracting it, and now will get whittled down as the import overtakes the export for the next few months.
I like to think of the ballance as an abstract yearly battery that i charge up in the summer and run down over the winter.

I don't know if it is just me, but when i call them I struggle to hear them. Yes, they are in a call centre, but don't appear to use noise cancelling microphones. Sounds like they are in a zoo.

Never mind the innovation - just having a utility company that bills me every month rather than every six months which EDF and British Gas insisted on doing. Octopus answer emails within a day or two and a DM on Xwitter gets a reponse within minutes. I've never tried phoning them - no need.
My app would not switch tariff to to IOG and they fixed that in three days - across a weekend. Good for them if they're shaking up an otherwise bloated and lazy industry.