Wednesday 21 December 2011
Staff training
Just attempted to make day three's call to the Microgen Team - 0845 270 1414. Turns out they're undergoing staff training until 11:45, so will call then. Timeline of my experiences with the Microgen Team will be posted later today.
Tuesday 20 December 2011
Day 2 of the daily call routine
Today I spent another 8 minutes on the phone to Scottish Power's Microgen Team - please join me in helping clog up their phone lines (which are apparently already experiencing extremely high call volumes) by ringing 0845 270 1414. Feel free to ask as many questions requiring long answers as you like.
Perhaps you think this tactic is unfair on the individuals who answer the calls but as far as I can see it is one of the only direct ways open to the consumer to fight an energy company which choses not to help its customers to the best of its abilities. The individuals who answer the phones I have no quarrel with; Scottish Power's employees have all been pleasant and helpful in their dealings with me: It is the protocols handed down to them and the policies which are left to them to enforce with which I have issues. At the end of every call, I explain to the individual with which I have been speaking - all of whose names I have been recording - what my position is, and they have been very understanding.
I am calling Scottish Power's Microgen Team every day they are open starting on the one-week anniversary of their sending back my application for Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) for solar PV panels at the 43p rate, because I am firmly of the opinion that Scottish Power have not done right by me as a loyal customer of many years in how they dealt with my application. I know from speaking to SP's complaints department that, despite my application having been delivered to the Microgen Team on Thursday 8th December at 1300 by Royal Mail Special Delivery (at a cost to me of £5.45), that application was not opened until Monday the 12th at around 11am. And it was only opened at that time because of a call I made to Scottish Power 15 minutes before, during a brief break in my working day.
I had called to check that they had received my application in the post and had been able to pair it with the MCS certificate which I sent via email as a PDF attachment on Saturday 10th of December, 1 hour after I received said certificate from the MCS database, which had been experiencing problems the previous week, hence my individual installation's certificate arriving so late. I felt assured that there would be no problem since I had been given a GUARANTEE by Scottish Power that if my completed application and MCS certificate were both with them on Sunday 11th December they would GUARANTEE that I would receive the FITs at their current rate of 43 pence. I trusted Scottish Power. More the fool me.
I was told on the phone that my application would have been opened and returned via second class post the previous week because my individual installation's MCS certificate was not included with it - I included my installer's MCS certificate, since this provides proof that my installation qualifies for an MCS certificate, and a simple subsequent phone call for the individual MCS number would be all the additional work that would be needed for an application to be processed - and that as such they COULD NOT marry my paper application with the MCS certificate I had sent via email. All of this was untrue. The people on the phone only knew of the condition of my application because I had explained the situation to them. Their department had not at this point answered my email sent on the Saturday and indeed had clearly not even opened my paper application as yet.
What appears to have happened is that, as soon as they had got off the phone with me, the agents of the Microgen Team frantically searched for and found my then-unopened paper application, wrote "No MCS" on it and mailed it back to me via second class post. It is post-marked December 12th and even the covering letter with it is dated that date. More significantly, the note in my account saying "No MCS" was time stamped at 11:17 on Monday 12th December, 30 minutes after I called the Microgen Team. So in the same span of time they could have spent pulling up my email (marked with my account number and all relevant data to be easily paired with my paper application) and processing my paper application with the MCS number and certificate provided therein, Scottish Power's agents opted to prevent me from receiving the FITs at 43p per KwH.
So this is what I got for Christmas from Scottish Power, after years of being a loyal customer and trusting that their GUARANTEE was worth something. For indeed, clearly, they had both my completed application and my MCS certificate on December 11th, as requested. They say it is their policy not to accept anything but paper copies of MCS certificates. In this day and age, that is a ridiculous policy for any energy company - especially one with whom all my regular exchange is online, via a web login. But it is an especially sickening policy when other energy companies have had the decency to call their customers (or even their customers' PV installers) over the weekend to obtain their MCS numbers, where these have been missing from their application. Not only do Scottish Power not care about their customers enough to call them in order to see that their application can be processed but their Microgen Team were not available on either Saturday 10th or Sunday 11th.
For my next post I will produce a timeline setting out what has happened to me since I spoke to Scottish Power on the phone and obtained my apparently meaningless guarantee. I may do that later today but it is quite likely I will wait until tomorrow, sometime after I have made call #3 to the Microgen Team.
Perhaps you think this tactic is unfair on the individuals who answer the calls but as far as I can see it is one of the only direct ways open to the consumer to fight an energy company which choses not to help its customers to the best of its abilities. The individuals who answer the phones I have no quarrel with; Scottish Power's employees have all been pleasant and helpful in their dealings with me: It is the protocols handed down to them and the policies which are left to them to enforce with which I have issues. At the end of every call, I explain to the individual with which I have been speaking - all of whose names I have been recording - what my position is, and they have been very understanding.
I am calling Scottish Power's Microgen Team every day they are open starting on the one-week anniversary of their sending back my application for Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) for solar PV panels at the 43p rate, because I am firmly of the opinion that Scottish Power have not done right by me as a loyal customer of many years in how they dealt with my application. I know from speaking to SP's complaints department that, despite my application having been delivered to the Microgen Team on Thursday 8th December at 1300 by Royal Mail Special Delivery (at a cost to me of £5.45), that application was not opened until Monday the 12th at around 11am. And it was only opened at that time because of a call I made to Scottish Power 15 minutes before, during a brief break in my working day.
I had called to check that they had received my application in the post and had been able to pair it with the MCS certificate which I sent via email as a PDF attachment on Saturday 10th of December, 1 hour after I received said certificate from the MCS database, which had been experiencing problems the previous week, hence my individual installation's certificate arriving so late. I felt assured that there would be no problem since I had been given a GUARANTEE by Scottish Power that if my completed application and MCS certificate were both with them on Sunday 11th December they would GUARANTEE that I would receive the FITs at their current rate of 43 pence. I trusted Scottish Power. More the fool me.
I was told on the phone that my application would have been opened and returned via second class post the previous week because my individual installation's MCS certificate was not included with it - I included my installer's MCS certificate, since this provides proof that my installation qualifies for an MCS certificate, and a simple subsequent phone call for the individual MCS number would be all the additional work that would be needed for an application to be processed - and that as such they COULD NOT marry my paper application with the MCS certificate I had sent via email. All of this was untrue. The people on the phone only knew of the condition of my application because I had explained the situation to them. Their department had not at this point answered my email sent on the Saturday and indeed had clearly not even opened my paper application as yet.
What appears to have happened is that, as soon as they had got off the phone with me, the agents of the Microgen Team frantically searched for and found my then-unopened paper application, wrote "No MCS" on it and mailed it back to me via second class post. It is post-marked December 12th and even the covering letter with it is dated that date. More significantly, the note in my account saying "No MCS" was time stamped at 11:17 on Monday 12th December, 30 minutes after I called the Microgen Team. So in the same span of time they could have spent pulling up my email (marked with my account number and all relevant data to be easily paired with my paper application) and processing my paper application with the MCS number and certificate provided therein, Scottish Power's agents opted to prevent me from receiving the FITs at 43p per KwH.
So this is what I got for Christmas from Scottish Power, after years of being a loyal customer and trusting that their GUARANTEE was worth something. For indeed, clearly, they had both my completed application and my MCS certificate on December 11th, as requested. They say it is their policy not to accept anything but paper copies of MCS certificates. In this day and age, that is a ridiculous policy for any energy company - especially one with whom all my regular exchange is online, via a web login. But it is an especially sickening policy when other energy companies have had the decency to call their customers (or even their customers' PV installers) over the weekend to obtain their MCS numbers, where these have been missing from their application. Not only do Scottish Power not care about their customers enough to call them in order to see that their application can be processed but their Microgen Team were not available on either Saturday 10th or Sunday 11th.
For my next post I will produce a timeline setting out what has happened to me since I spoke to Scottish Power on the phone and obtained my apparently meaningless guarantee. I may do that later today but it is quite likely I will wait until tomorrow, sometime after I have made call #3 to the Microgen Team.
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