Whatever you do don't expect any help (NPower)

Member Name: Tracy_1127

Product:	NPower
Date:	03/09/08 (178 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: terrible customer services, utterly useless company

Npower in my opinion are one of the worst energy suppliers and their customer services is appalling. Let me explain...

Five years ago we moved house. We found the house we moved into had an electricity meter so we rang npower to remove it as we wanted to pay by monthly direct debit. That's where all the problems started.

They came promptly to remove the meter, we had yet to move our belongings in so we hadn't used much in the way of electricity at this point, just enough for the odd cup of tea and power tools while we did the place up but we'd purchased tokens for the meter to do this so we assumed it was paid for.

Shortly after we moved in we received a bill from npower for the princely sum of £600. I called to explain we had only just moved in and had used tokens in the meter up to that point and asked where the £600 could possibly have come from.

I was told it was for the last few years of the previous tenants electricity, apparently the meter had been set wrong all this time but they had neglected to change it and now the house had changed hands this amount was payable.

I explained the former tenant had passed away and expected this to be the end of it. It wasn't. Not by a long way.

The girl on the phone said she'd sort it out. I forgot about it for a few weeks until we received another bill, this time for £700. I rang again, explained the whole story again, and was told we were liable for this bill. What the..?

I asked why we were liable when we'd only just moved in and the meter setting was nothing to do with us nor was the past few years of electricity usage and was told it was my bill. Now after getting annoyed with the customer services operative it emerged the former tenant had the same surname as me, my name is a pretty common one and they assumed I was the same person pretending not to be to get out of paying.

I thought if I explained it would all be fine, I gave details of my former address so they could see I'd paid my bills and offered them my former landlady's address to confirm I had indeed lived somewhere else for the last 5 years. They took these and reassured me that would be the end of it.

A month later I received another bill for the £700. I spoke to the accounts department this time and the guy said he'd sort it, very sorry for the inconvenience and not to worry.

A month later the same bill arrived again. I had started writing down names of the people I spoke to by this point so I called the same guy in accounts who apologised again and said he thought he'd sorted it but he would put it through again.

The following month I received a bill for over £800 and realised they were adding our electricity onto the bill that wasn't ours. I rang accounts again to be told the guy had left. Great. I spoke to someone else, it took me 15 minutes to explain the whole situation and he informed me he would sort it out, separate the amounts so we only had ours to pay and send a final bill for the former tenant confirming the amount had been wiped.

A week later I got a final reminder for the £800 bill. I called again. Got told they'd sort it again. They didn't.

I rang at least twice a month, sometimes twice a week to try and sort this. I did get understandably shirty with them but never to the point where they could put the phone down. My partner rang a couple of times but he just lost his temper and they disconnected the calls so that wasn't the solution.

This went on for 12 months. That's right. An entire year of regular calls and having to ask them to take the £600 amount off each bill they sent us because it wasn't ours so we could pay what we owed and nothing else.

Finally I spoke to another guy in accounts who was horrified to hear how long this had been going on. He said he'd sort it out. I thought "yeah, I've heard that before" and expected the problem to continue but amazingly he did sort it out.

This proved to me that any one of the operatives we'd spoken to, especially the other guy in accounts, could have sorted this out at any point but just hadn't bothered to do so. We received a final bill for the former tenant with the outstanding amount as £0.00 and filed it just in case!

We waited for one more bill to make sure the problem wasn't ongoing again then promptly changed to Scottish Power and never looked back.

I would never deal with npower again, terrible customer services and utterly useless at sorting out a minor problem.

Summary: I would never recommend them to anyone