Comments on: Let me pay my bill Contact Energy

By: Lance Wiggs

Lance Wiggs — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:51:23 +0000

Horrible Sounds like it’s time to consider switching to Powershop. Clicking the Flower on the top right of this blog is a first step to remove the pain of the legacy companies, and you’ll get given money ($50 of credit) rather than asked for a bond

Lance

By: Iain

Iain — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:35:52 +0000

Contact Energy – surely must suffer eventually.

As a new resident in the Wellington region, I thought it would be easier to go with the current power supplier rather than open a new account with my past supplier Mercury.

Contact have an online application so that seemed reasonable. However during the process they say they may have to charge a bond, but will contact me if this is required. Having had decades of power and phone accounts, and a clean credit record, I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be needed.

Eventually I got a letter saying that my account had been opened and that a $150 bond would be charged with my first account. Is this what they mean by “contacting me”. Not much point once they have already opened the account?

I get miffed putting a bond in the bank of a supplier. I like my money staying in my bank! Anyway I just let it roll and waited to see my first account. Sure enough, the $150 bond was charged.

Being surly I only paid the power usage, after much difficulty as their online system hides information (as mentioned by others). This led to my being threatened that if not paid within 7 days they would charge me a $25 recovery fee.

I think that this is poor and enough is enough.

Perhaps mercury weren’t so bad after all!

By: Lance Wiggs

Lance Wiggs — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:13:07 +0000

I’m with Powershop – and you can be too if you follow the yellow flower on the top right. You can even buy FlowerPower from PowerKiwi – which is a company I co-founded. Powershop only do electricity, but the prices are turning out to be a lot cheaper overall, especially as gas consumption is so low. It just makes sense that in the long run Powershop, with a web based approach, will be able to deliver at a lower cost of service.

While the discounts are increasing from the competition after Powershop’s entry, the prices are still better as far as I am aware.

Enough advertising. Contact do the payment smoothing as well – but that’s not interesting to me. What’s interesting is being able to pay quickly – which is where Contract failed. Vodafone is appalling at this stuff – their website is unusable and their online billing was pathetic. What’s wrong with emailing me a PDF?

By: tylersdad

tylersdad — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:56:51 +0000

You should switch to Genesis. you get electrickery and gas from the one place, and you get a prompt payment discount (you might not get this by the sounds of it- ha ha). and you get brownie points to buy stuff (don;t ask me what but its free), and i am getting a daily charge rebate off the gas of .45c . and they charge pretty much what the others charge.
but best of all, i am on smooth pay, and i still get the early payment discount even though sometimes i still owe in mid winter.
now you’ll ask about when i’m in credit in summer – swings and roundabouts – so as long as i know i pay $109 a f/nite 26 times in a row then i know i;ll be having long hot showers year round.

but don’t get me started on vodafone – GRRRRRRRR.

By: Mathew Sanders

Mathew Sanders — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:42:43 +0000

Poor Contact Energy – they’re not feeling the love at the moment… I wrote a post this weekend as well about my experience I had with them that lead me to switch to Powershop as soon as I could:

http://www.mathewsanders.com/touchpoints/how-contact-energy-lost-97275-by-chasing-25-182.html

By: James

James — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:25:58 +0000

I love these posts :)