[Unwoke]

Might it not be an idea to stop burnishing your PC and Green credentials, cancel the enormous advertising budget and pass the resultant savings onto your customers?
What is the intended benefit to Eon from this expenditure? To attract new customers (unlikely) or to make yourselves look more community friendly and less exploitative?
I’ve been through the same experience with Cooperative Bank; they’ve lost my business.
Concentration on customer service would achieve better results.

[Mailman]

TV and radio ads just go straight over my head on the rare accasions I'm watching live TV and use them as an excuse for a toilet break, a tea break or to let the cat in etc. To be fair to Eon Next they are not the only energy supplier or energy producer or manufacturer or service provider that some/many describe as being guilty of greenwashing. I have no truck with Eon Next as a supplier on price. Ditto with Customer Service although I admit to having had a trouble free ride with them for over 2 years. Calls to them have been remarkably fast and have been able to carry out my requests WRT to tariff changes. There are plenty of horror stories re smart meters and erroneous billing but are these reported cases the 'tip of the iceberg' or just the 'normal' issues that arise with all energy suppliers? I make no judgement on the scale of such Customer Service issues but thankfully I've not had issues with either. 👍

[AndrewR]

If an energy supplier has money to waste on annoying repetitive offputting adverts but can't do basic things like phone support in the evening, then it has it's priorities all wrong.

[Andy65]

Originally Posted by AndrewR

If an energy supplier has money to waste on annoying repetitive offputting adverts but can't do basic things like phone support in the evening, then it has it's priorities all wrong.

I suspect the ads aren't aimed at our particular demographic @AndrewR, we're likely to be in the minority as hard as that is to believe.
I haven't seen the ads myself, I record all commercial TV programmes wherever possible to FF through the ads.

[AndrewR]

True, @Andy65 but there's a more fundamental systemic problem here. If cost of obtaining a new customer through slick marketing with happy cartoon graphics is lower than the cost of actually dealing with a customer who needs help, it then makes business sense to simply pretend to do customer support while actually engineering your support process to make anyone with an issue give up and change supplier.

I may be cynical but pretending to offer 'chat' support on Whatsapp while actually staffing it so badly it takes 3 hours for someone to cut and paste a stock reply, and turning phone support off at 4 before people get home from work seems to indicate to me that that this is exactly what E.on are doing. Sadly the regulators seem powerless to stop them.

[Andy65]

I'm fairly sure that when they first introduced support via Twitter, Facebook etc, it was aimed at those who wanted to send a message but didn't need an instant response ie they could be sent a reply and read it whenever they wanted to. I don't think that it was marketed as instant messaging.

I agree with you about the phone hours though @AndrewR, what these businesses seem to fail to understand is that if you get the basics right in the first place, you shouldn't need as much support. The systems are becoming more complex and therefore there's more inherent problems, and the customer support that they do have don't have the skills/training/knowledge to give a good level of service. It's not just e.onnext, it's widespread.

This is why I always try to phone businesses as much as possible, if you send any kind of message it rarely gets read properly so you have to do it again, and again....

[AndrewR]

I'm happy with phoning if I find an organisation to be trustworthy, but having phoned E.on three times and having been lied to three times, I've switched to getting everything in writing. I strongly suspect I'll be sending a dossier or two to the Ombudsman at some point in the future, and it's amazing how many times organisations who 'record all calls' suddenly have some sort of technical issue when you exercise your right to a copy of recordings that would embarrass them!