Powergen Review

Overall Rating

They do supply electricity.

Expensive
Poor Customer Service in the extreme
They don't track your payments

I am currently living in rented accommodation and inherited PowerGen as my electricity supplier. I was recently told by a salesman at my door from another company that PowerGen are forced to be the most expensive because of some government rules. I would have changed but couldn't be bothered with the hassle as I might not be in the property that long. Now I am cancelling it and moving supplier. The problem being that I opted to pay my bill online, on their website. Their site never gave us a reference number for the transaction and we were left to assume it had gone through. Then a couple of weeks later we received a reminder bill. I phoned (India Call Centre) and they said the amount had not been paid, and that if we had paid it to find out the account number and sort code of the account the money was paid into. We checked with our bank and the money had gone through to them. But they understandable wouldn't give us any info on their bank account because that would be illegal. We phoned PowerGen again to tell them this but it was India again and the guy on the phone couldn't comprehend what we were saying to him. Don't get me wrong his English is a lot better than my India but surely these companies need to employ people in their customer services that are able to communicate with their customers. Anyway, we decided to write a letter, enclosing a bank statement proving we paid the bill to there Headoffice in Warrington, then at least we could deal with someone in this country. A week or so went by, we heard nothing and thought it may have been sorted, no such luck. I got a phone call from them again asking the sort code and account number of the account we paid the money into, I informed the lady that this was not possible but said I would ask again. No it's still illegal just like it was a couple of weeks ago. Turns out PowerGen have an amazing 3 Bank Accounts. Wow, that would take them ages to find our payment given that they new the amount, date and time of the transaction. But no they wanted us to do the hard work for them. In the end we had to get our bank manager to phone them and tell them that we couldn't get this information for them and we had proved we'd paid it and it was their problem. They supposedly will sort it out the next 10 days, but I'm not holding my breath.

I will then be terminating my contract for a cheaper power supplier with a British Call Centre, a grasp of how to use the internet for payments and a small knowledge of British banking practices. I would advise anyone currently with of thinking getting supplied by PowerGen to do the same.