Considering February has the least number of days in a month, so much has happened and so much has changed for our ever growing Community. I’m not sure that I really understood how much had happened until I started to note it all down for this; our brand new monthly feature. Hannah, the team and I were all keen to share with you all the progress of the Community, our members' influences and also events that have been happening within E.ON Next and the energy industry.

I would like to start by giving some Community Members a huge shout out! @theunknowntech, who got 130 thumbs up! @Landmark, who has given 96 thumbs up!
We have @theunknowntech, @Landmark, @simont, @JimC, @UKDave51, @DWRUK, @Tracy, @Mabel and @Queenie who have all leveled up. Keep it going guys, you’re smashing it!


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Since the beginning of February, we have welcomed 1414 new users and have had an amazing 1316 new posts! As a Community, we have given 385 thumbs up in just February, which is a massive increase from the previous year! You could probably guess our most viewed post, which is the Price Cap Q&A which has received over 4600 views and 55 replies. The Price Cap has been a hot topic of conversation, on social media platforms and in the news, so if you haven’t had a look at the thread, I highly recommend having a browse, but also, have a read of the Here to help thread. As always, the Community is here for user to user support and of course, the team behind the Community will step in where necessary.

Our team has grown from just Hannah and I, to 7, with the addition of 5 extra fabulous and knowledgeable Nexties. You can find out more about these amazing humans soon, when we get our very own team introductions thread! This is just one of the changes that you may have noticed since the New Year.

The look and feel of the Community hasn’t really changed much since October 2020, until the beginning of this year when it seems to be coming into its own, with upgrades and a minor face lift on the platform. The notifications popup has had a style refresh, global stats are now featured at the top of the home page, a new layout for the profile page and other small cosmetic changes. The biggest ones that have appeared more recently, are that members' avatars show when they have commented on a thread - all the more reason to add a profile photo ;) - as well as a ‘latest discussions’ and ‘top contributors’ widget. All of these changes however can cause some glitches or ‘bugs’ if you like and our resident exterminator (theunknowntech) with their keen eye for detail and awesome tech skills has kept my inbox notifications regular. Thank you for all your super detective skills TUT - I know you'll appreciate the Pikachu GIF.

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Other than the Price Cap and He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named’s antics over in the East, the main topic on E.ON Next customers minds are their IHD’s and why they may not be working and what we can do to fix this. Usually it’s pretty straight forward and we just need to send a message to your smart meter to let it know when and how often it needs to send readings. 8/10 this fixes the issue and the IHD comes back on and works as before. They can also lose connection if you have recently switched suppliers (yes this even includes an E.ON to E.ON Next switch!) but this rarely needs any intervention from us as after 6 weeks/42 days, it will come back online. However, there are times where none of the above works and we either need to get you an engineer appointment, pop an email to the smart metering team to get an expert eye on it, or last resort, contact the DCC to intervene as the problem may be out of our control. If you have an IHD that isn’t working correctly, the Community members won’t have the ability to look into your account and so the best way to get your IHD back up and running is to pop us a message on either Facebook/Twitter. I know we always say it, but honestly, we are there 24/7 at the moment and someone will get back to you sooner. You can even pop us a message in the morning and carry on with your daily tasks until we reply, how awesome is that? This means you don’t need to listen to our awesome hold music and you can be completely hands free to give your attention to the more important jobs…feeding the chickens or walking the dog are just a couple of examples.

Our Community member @JimC also got in touch about how our smart meter information on the website is incorrect or they had to go elsewhere for information and so I raised this with the website tech team and we are working on getting this updated. With your continued support we can only get better and improve our services for our customers. That is Community teamwork!

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On a completely separate note I wanted to talk about the recent storms that ravaged the country this month and have also been a topic of conversation; many customers being left without power and heating in some of the worst and scariest storms to date. And so I pose a question to you, do you think that climate change is to blame for these extreme weather events we have had? Gusts of 110mph with storm Eunice have battered the UK with disruptions to flights, public transport, roads and schools. Surely, the rising sea temperatures, extend of sea ice, the position of global jet streams including the polar streams that affect UK weather in particular are all factors that are affected by climate change?

That is it from me for the first February rundown. See you around on the Community.
Sending positive energy to you,
Beki
Community Manager
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