British Gas (online)

The online resources of British Gas are largely disappointing. I found the web-site confusing and it mis-informed me about what plan I was on. Eventually, frustration with the email system in particular lead me to abandon it and pay my bills by phone instead. If you have a large amount of time and patience then try it, otherwise stick to more conventional means.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then i'll begin... After a year spent with british gas supplying our gas and electricity, the time came for us to move out. In order to get our deposits back from our landlord we needed proof that we'd paid our bills up until the day our tenancy ended. Now about 2 months before this date we had received our only bill of the year, £600 for gas and electricity. That wasnt too bad so my housemate paid it off. When it came to towards our moving out date we called customer services and asked for a final bill and for our account to be closed. In order to do this i first had to change over the account to my name, something we'd never bothered to do before. I made it very clear that as we were moving to different houses this bill should be sent to my new address. Over a month later i hadn't received any bill so of course we hadnt got our deposits back. I made another call and about a week later i got another bill, this one only for gas. This bill was massive for less than 2 months gas, and it turned out that it included the portion of the previous £600 bill which had been for gas. We were being asked to pay for a years worth of gas which we'd already paid. Several more phone calls ensued and numerous times i was assured that i would be called back either within hours or in several days time. Not once did i receive the promised phone call. I lost count of the number of different people i spoke to, none of which were much help at all. Finally i managed to speak to a helpful person who got me to send them a copy of the bank statement containing the £600 payment. I did this and although it took several weeks we eventually got a correct final bill. However in the meantime i received at least 3 very unpleasant threatening letters demanding immediate payment, and they even went as far as to hand our account over to a debt collection agency! Once i had paid this the problems didn't end. Now we needed proof that we had cleared all debts, yet we were told repeatedly that they couldn't send us this in writing. Our last resort was to go into our previous landlords and call up british gas and hand them over to the landlord so they could confirm no charges were outstanding. It was over 6 months after we moved out that we finally got this problem sorted.
This is without doubt the worst customer service i've ever experienced and it caused us no end of problems and financial difficulty due to not being able to reclaim several hundred pounds each in deposits for our previous house. I was treated with no respect whatsoever by the majority of people i spoke to and it was impossible to speak to the same person twice in a row. I would suggest that British Gas have some serious work to do on their customer service, and i made my feelings perfectly clear in a written complaint. Although i thankfully received an acknowledgment of this complaint, it took over 3 weeks to arrive. Says it all really

The British Gas website allows you to check your bills online if you sign up for paperless billing (save the world and all that). Its really handy for finding out whether you are in debit or credit and to see how much you are using per month so you can see if you need to cut down if you are using lots. Theres lots of other information about power useage etc which i personally dont understand but some clever physics type might.

If you sign up for online bills instead of sent in the post you can get 4 free energy efficient bulbs which save you loads on your energy costs. The website also offers a service to tell you how energy efficient your house is and what you can do to improve it. You can check your bills and there is also a help service. A great website.