OVO Reviews

It was hard to progress

- Like any call centre job, you would have to deal with verbal abuse and unfair survey responses, and if it was a high call volume day like if there was a change of price cap, or if a particular policy had changed, the work would be exhausting. - The working conditions themselves deteriorated significantly as management realised that the company was going under, and the efforts made to ameliorate the strain caused by a series of increasingly significant institutional failures only served to make things more hostile. - In order: the first thing that was thrown out was a Direct Debit policy that made sense. We effectively added another month to the Direct Debit calculation, meaning most people's recommended Direct Debit increased. Not because they were in debt, which would be understandable, but because we needed to have it on the books that we had an amount of capital, even though it was effectively being loaned to us by customers in the middle of a cost of living and energy price crisis. This got a lot of people very angry with us, entirely justifiably. They did this when I was a week out of training, meaning my first experience of working there was of getting a bollocking that I couldn't really disagree with. - We did have a reduction that we could apply originally if we judged that it would be the right thing to do, but "too many" of these were given out, meaning we were given a mandatory two hours off the phone to reaffirm how necessary it was for us to have (temporarily) a load of other people's money. - Naturally, none of the people instituting this policy worked taking calls, meaning we were essentially cannon fodder until the dust settled. It was stupid, poorly, implemented, and crucially, the algorithm used to calculate customer usage was frequently off because of technical issues, some of which we literally couldn't resolve. - Training for us emphasised completely the wrong things that we would actually need to do the job; hours were spent on renewables, when actually it should've been spent on learning the finicky workings of the billing and metering platform Kaluza. Except there was no dummy platform, so we couldn't practice on the live system ever, before being actively on the phone with a customer. This, naturally, primes newer agents for abuse for taking too long, and makes your first couple of weeks a trial by fire which you either get through - and in so doing, you become accustomed to limited resources, limited support, and limited empathy from the public at large, or you get so stressed that you flame out and leave and the company experiences a Darwinian shedding of dead weight. - If our training was bad, the training for the offshore departments (Collections and Pay As You Go) must have been about three minutes long; I found the Collections team superb to work with, and made some great friends there, but system access was wildly uneven, meaning they just didn't have the same ability to fix problems that we had. They also had no time to develop the same level of familiarity, dealing with inbound, outbound, mixed queues, Webchats, and emails, where we only dealt with calls and emails. Collections, expected to deal with people who were often having the worst days of their entire lives, were thrown to the wolves because for some reason the decision was made that less time and energy would be spent training them up to do their jobs. This then meant that the most vulnerable customers were left out in the cold, through no fault of either their own, or the advisors. - When I joined, time between calls, needed to do any admin work it would be awkward to do on call (to raise complaints, check on photos, raise tickets to tech, and so on) maxed out at five minutes. That was reduced to three, and then to one minute and forty-nine seconds, and then (if you had the misfortune of the AI system labelling a call 'unknown') it would be one minute ten. I don't know if you've ever had to spell check an email written by a frequently illiterate AI about an issue that has taken 40 minutes to resolve, but the sense of time pressure and foreclosure it creates is immense. One of the other things you're marked on is First Call Resolution, meaning if someone calls back within seven days, you're penalised. Let's say you send an email that makes no sense because, as mentioned, AI, and then oops! Repeats are up. This is worsened when you're not informed how long you're going to have to do all of this. When the shortened times were initially introduced, we were encouraged to only take six minutes of what's called "busy time" per day, meaning if you needed more than no time to do your job properly, you'd then get chased up by management and a patronising message would be dropped in the chat by someone who does not work on the phones about how much we're failing the customers for not taking back to back calls. This was then, after a few weeks, extended to twelve minutes. How generous. You take about 40 calls a day. - The reason for this is extremely obvious: more queries processed faster mean higher potential for Direct Debit increases, payments made, book balancing, and so on. It also means that you cut the call queue down, so the metrics for your management improve. The issues with this became apparent immediately: no tool is perfect, meaning any corrections you have to make are a you problem rather than a tools problem because call summaries only generate after the call ends; some admin takes ages to do and people don't want to sit in silence while you type a novel so that whoever is responsible for it doesn't mess up the account any further; if you need to hyperlink information about additional grants and support, upload someone's bills as an attachment, or any other number of things you know are needed to make sure everything is covered, you're also penalised. You end up sacrificing doing your job on the altar of also doing your job. - Balancing the various metrics that you're made eligible for bonus by (commitment, adherence, QA, CSAT, repeats, transfers, Direct Debit policy adherence, smart meter bookings) with nonsense metrics (Trustpilot reviews, case accuracy, Usage Tool usage, complaints raised) wastes all of your time, and means that you've always missed something, and there's always an excuse to pick at you in 121 meetings. Genuinely, the only ones that indicate you're doing a good job are I would say QA, same day repeats, and case accuracy. If you're not breaking data protection law, giving people a reason to call back an hour after you've put the phone down, and you've made sure that all of the complicated issues that need escalation are escalated to the right department properly, you're doing better than someone who refuses to transfer calls to Collections because don't worry guys, I've got this, and I also want £200 at the end of the month. - The priorities in place do not incentivise actually fixing problems you are presented with. - The billing platform breaks constantly. Meter reads will sometimes just not get accepted. The computer will occasionally forget that someone has had their meter removed and start applying Standing Charge again. There are bits of the platform that you shouldn't touch without seniority. Are they blocked for some users? Absolutely not! You can just delete someone's meter on the first day if you want to. - All of the above issues are fairly minor when compared to the innumerable ways that we routinely fail vulnerable people - there are the classic Ofgem fines for both failing to pay Warm Home Discount and for not having the proper guardrails in place to prevent involuntary prepayment meters being installed, but there's also the fact that the majority of support that we can provide is either a link to our Extra Support Scheme (which runs out of heated blankets, smart plugs, and insulation strips within a couple of weeks) or assorted hyperlinks to other, better organisations like StepChange or the Citizens Advice. - There is far too much and far too little oversight. Things that do not matter - loo breaks and busy time - are rigidly policed, but if you mess up and put someone in debt which leads to damage to their credit score or their property or even results in an erroneous county court judgement, nothing will happen to you. There are consequences for going to the bathroom, or being sick, but none for actually hurting people. This isn't me calling for more surveillance in the call centre, but I am calling for actual systems of accountability that aren't your metrics taking a hit, maybe. The degree to which you can put people at risk is appalling, and not enough is made of it either in training or in your team. - I have had incidents on the job that have led to a worsening of admittedly pre extant PTSD. To date, I've had three people threaten suicide, and one blame it on me explicitly. I have seen people expected to respond to vicious ableist and racist abuse from customers calmly and professionally. I have listened to people dying of cancer at the other end of the phone with £600 bills because of medical equipment necessary to their survival and the only thing I could do was apologise for not being able to do enough. Call centres are bad workplaces. They're dystopically managed, mentally exhausting, and their priorities lie in squeezing whatever can be gotten out of a person and then hiring their replacement in the next twenty person hiring frenzy. While OVO was I'd posit less of a panopticon, the flaws of that system of labour organisation are still there, and are vastly exacerbated when the company utilising them is so atrociously managed that they genuinely believe that a subscription to Gemini will solve the problem. No! The problem is that energy shouldn't be a commodity, and it shouldn't be privately owned and subject to limp regulation. The problem is that a system of incentives that means that you're rewarded for limiting the time and effort you spend actually helping people of course ends up with people who need extra time left in the dust. The problem is that no one was willing to give up the ghost in time and so now OVO is shambling toward its inevitable subsumption into Eon, which will become the UK's primary energy monopoly. It's going to clump into a monopoly anyway; just take it out of the private sector so at least some of the incentives get less perverse.