Rant - service providers who are inaccessible to the consumer

[Clariman]

I am getting increasingly frustrated with the business model where the consumer deals with one company but the underlying service is being provided by another. The consumer might be able to see that the issue lies with the underlying service but has no means of contacting the provider - and the customer-facing company seems to be incapable of operating effectively with them either. Two real world examples I am dealing with;

Smart Meters
We own our own home and 2 holiday lets. All 3 have SMETS2 Smart Meters installed. One stopped reporting back in November 2021 after Storm Arwen. The others stopped working at different points in 2022. I am powerless to get this fixed. I have been on online chats with our energy supplier (Bulb) countless times and they cannot get it fixed, because a 3rd party is responsible for the network it uses. Siemens installs them and I think DCC (a subsidiary of Crapita - as Private Eye calls them) runs the network. Smart meters were great for the 2 holiday lets but just as Staycations get more popular and household fuel gets more expensive they are of zero use to me. I did ask Bulb to send me a resolution deadlock letter so I could raise it with the ombudsman but I hesitated in case our holiday lets should not be on domestic fuel supplies(?).

Broadband and Phone
Since around Boxing Day I've been trying to swap broadband suppliers at one of our properties and it keeps failing. The initial reason was that Openreach thought our property's original name and new name were 2 different properties even though we were original owners of the property and officially changed the builder's name for it via the local council and Royal Mail nearly 10 years ago. So when trying to do a line takeover they said there was no service to the property. I won't bore you with the catalogue of disasters and the fact that order number 6 from the new supplier has failed even though the address issue has been fixed. And who fixed the data issue? Me by ringing the new supplier and the old supplier about 12 times to get them to update openreach. And what is the current issue? Who the @!£$! knows? The new supplier certainly doesn't. At the moment, our old supplier have emailed me to say "sorry you are leaving us" for mid-Feb but openreach is telling the new supplier that the old one haven't released it yet.

Both these issues would be a lot easier to fix if I could call the underlying service providers. In fact, it feels to me as if these service providers hide under the covers and are less accountable than they should be.

Thanks for listening
Clariman

[88V8]

Since around Boxing Day I've been trying to swap broadband suppliers at one of our properties ...

Perhaps some of the consumer-facing suppliers care more than others?

We moved from Scottish Power to Ovo because the database SP were using had the wrong address so sending an engineer failed umpteen times.
Ovo were willing to get the (National) database corrected.

As regards broadband, we are with Zen whose customer service is great. I bet they would sort an issue such as you describe.

Other suppliers may vary. Which mag regularly rate BB suppliers, iirc the cheap ones do not do very well.

Bulb... went bust did they not?

V8

[AsleepInYorkshire]

Top rant

AiY(D)

[AF62]

Smart Meters
We own our own home and 2 holiday lets. All 3 have SMETS2 Smart Meters installed. One stopped reporting back in November 2021 after Storm Arwen. The others stopped working at different points in 2022. I am powerless to get this fixed. I have been on online chats with our energy supplier (Bulb) countless times and they cannot get it fixed, because a 3rd party is responsible for the network it uses. Siemens installs them and I think DCC (a subsidiary of Crapita - as Private Eye calls them) runs the network. Smart meters were great for the 2 holiday lets but just as Staycations get more popular and household fuel gets more expensive they are of zero use to me. I did ask Bulb to send me a resolution deadlock letter so I could raise it with the ombudsman but I hesitated in case our holiday lets should not be on domestic fuel supplies(?).

I have experienced similar with my smart meter loosing connection or the data not flowing through.

However my issues were fixed within weeks not months or years by my supplier, Octopus, who as you were with the failed Bulb will now be your supplier.

Unlike many energy companies they do answer the phone, and the phone is answered in the UK.

But the quickest way is to contact them via Twitter when they seem to allocate an individual to your case and respond pretty promptly, plus your Twitter conversation is a record of your discussion with them should you need to complain.

In my case after it was established pretty quickly that communication had been lost then they immediately arranged for someone to come out and reboot the meter to kick start the connection process and everything was working again - and as the meter stores 18 months of data all the historical readings flowed through a day or so later.

So perhaps the issue isn’t that subsidiary service providers are not directly contactable, but just that some (most?) primary service providers are useless.

[Clariman]

Well I have given up on the phone and broadband move after order number 8 failed, so cancelled the order. I then called my existing supplier and said I was leaving. They reduced my monthly payment by over 40%. If they had done that when I called them before Christmas it would have saved everyone a lot of time!

[DrFfybes]

FWIW I always use BT for Broadband.

Generally yhey are pretty good at giving a deal when the current one ends, but mainly their closer relationship with Openreach compared to other providers seems to just help getting things done.

At the house in Exeter the 1950/60s aluminium phone cables (4Mbps on a good day, 1.5 if it rained) were replaced with FTTP as part of the minimum service guarantee and Exeter becoming a Fibre City. In this case FTTP means Fibre to the Pole. However only those with BT Broadband could actually get it cabled from the pole into the premises, which in our case upped our monthly chanrge by a whole pound. Apparently the other providers were unwilling to pay the fee Openreach wanted to make the connection, which I later learnt varied according to the contract they have with Openreach. Pretty much the whole road moved over to BT.

For TV BT were hopeless - no point in whole home wifi if their telly box still needs a 30 foot cable to the router,however Sky have been fantastic. We moved and Sky couldn't install a dish (Covid) but once they could we got SkyQ upgrade and all the stuff we had in Exeter, plus they kept our 17 years' service on the account, so 2 x mobiles with more data than we use, and Sky 'entertainment' package, for about £27/month.

OTOH after we moved here and I finally managed to get the National Meter Database updated so it matched the number on our new SP installed Smart Meter (the previous owners had been paying gas bills based on someone else's readings, and with Covid they wouldn't come out and look at the one on the outside of our house), I have still had no luck in getting anyone to come out and actually make it Smart or provide a gizmo in the house. Consequently they take readings from the Smart leccy one, but I have to go online and submit the gas one.

Paul