Utilities Part One – nPower

Since moving in to the new place, one of the banes of my life have been the utility companies for the property.

nPower in particular have been stunningly shit. It’s taken them eighteen months to get the name right on the account – the letting agency notified them of the change, and they did nothing. I’ve gone through the process no less than six times, sending ID and proof of tenancy, and it all disappeared into the black hole of “Fuck-All Happening” that seems to define nPower. Even their complaints team were so bad that they didn’t even call me within the expected timescale, despite repeated requests.  The best one was emailing the proof documents the fifth time, putting on ‘read receipts’ etc., and getting one back saying “The message was deleted without being read“.  That was when I started getting really pissed off.

Additionally, because of ‘moving to a new system’, they managed to not send me any bills – and not be able to send bills, because gawd knows, I asked! – for a year. I then got four bills in a day – all printed on the same day, all sent out, all for different amounts.  And all with one week in which to pay.

It appears to have now been sorted. I totally lost the plot, and requested that they just send me a “we can’t be arsed to fix the problem” deadlock letter so that I could take it up with the Energy Ombudsman and get them properly screwed over. Suddenly I finally got through to nPower’s one efficient person, and everything was done within twenty minutes, with her not even being able to understand why it had taken so long. I think her phrase “Well I can see that someone put the documents in the system. They just didn’t bother to do anything else with them” pretty much sums up the entire painful process with nPower.

I’m going to wait for the next bill so I can see whether they’ve finally got things right or not. I’m remaining pessimistic for the moment, but who knows, maybe miracles do happen on occasion…