United Utilities: need to get some new staff I think! (United Utilities)

Member Name: stephbond89

Product:	United Utilities
Date:	06/08/09 (15 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Only company to supply the water so we have no choice...!

Disadvantages: They don't listen to the customers who phone them and do things wrong which don't get sorted!

Up until today I didn't really have anything bad to say about United Utilities, they weren't too bad, we'd never had any problems with them, and they tended to be pleasent when we phoned up about anything. I remember one day when we woke up a few days after Christmas to no water, and we were very worried, it was the weekend which meant there was nobody to get in contact with at the place who owned our flat, and we didn't want to have to go through the whole weekend with no water for obvious reasons...!!! So we phoned United Utilities who were very helpful and looked into the problem, looking into every possibility for us, it actually turned out somebody in the flat below us had turned off the water supply as there had been a leak, not phoned for a plumber, and not let anybody know they'd turned off the water...such clever people eh!

But today I have been very angered by United Utilities! We moved out of that flat in May of this year, and when I got to the new house, I phoned up United Utilities, and told them we had moved out of the flat on the 8th May and had moved into the new house, which the woman on the end of the phone said was fine and was all sorted, so we left it, we set up a direct debit and started paying the new bill on the new property. Then three months on I received a text message from United Utilities which said I had to urgently get in touch with them, I got a little worried by this worrying our direct debits hadn't been going out, or something like that. So I called them up, and was told there was nothing on the account, which confused me and I started then thinking it was a false text. Until the woman on the end of the phone then said it could be on an old address, so I asked her to look for me.

She told me that there was a bill on the old address which hasn't been paid, this confused me as we had been paying by direct debit in the flat too, and we thought we had been upto date, she couldn't talk to me about it as my name wasn't on the account and I had to wait for my husband to wake up to put me on the account.

Two hours later he phoned them and put me on the phone, and I got a rather snotty man on the other end of the line saying we owned £150. I couldn't believe it, and I couldn't think where the huge bill had come from. So I asked about the dates, and he said it was from April through to July, I explained that we had moved out in May, and thats why the direct had been cancelled, and that we obviously weren't living there during May, June and July so why should we pay a bill for then...he said we hadn't cancelled the account, which we had, when I phoned up I explained we were moving from one address to another, and she said ok and sorted it.

I explained this and the snotty man on the end of the phone said that I had to send off my tenancy agreement from the old place, but the issue with that is that the tenancy didn't run out til the 25th June, as we moved out a month early due to the crappness of the flat and the issues we were having, I then explained this to him and he put me on hold once again (this was the 4th time now and I had been on the phone for an hour), he then said I had to send a letter with it, and something to show when we'd moved in and they'd "try" and sort it out so we weren't paying for three months water when we weren't using it or even living there!

The woman I had spoken to when we moved into the house obviously hadn't written down that we had moved from one address to another, and the account had kept running up bills, the guy I spoke to today was thick and when I asked him about why if we hadn't been paying our bills we hadn't got letters, he said "you had bank statements"...this made no sense to me really but hey.

Ah well, I now have to go rifling through old files and papers which I have hundreds of but probably no suitable ones, to prove I wasn't living in a crap hole flat, that place gave us nothing but grief, they can get lost if they think we're paying for 3 months water when we didn't use any!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Summary: I wish they would just listen and do things right!!!