A recently bereaved reader had a most distressing time dealing with Flogas when she tried to change the name on the account from that of her husband, who had passed away suddenly in the spring, to her own name.
Our reader contacted Flogas on May 20th “through their customer service email as there was no specific bereavement process available when I searched their website,” she begins. It was just three weeks after her husband had died and she was trying, insofar as possible, to keep on top of things.
“No one responded to my email so I had to follow up again five days later,” she continues.
“With a lot of forward and back on email and waiting days in between for a response, I was eventually asked for a final meter reading and to call the sales team to set up the new account,” she says.
RM Block
She repeatedly said she was not looking to set up a new account but to change the name on the existing account that was in her late husband’s name.
“They kept insisting I needed to set up a new account with new tariffs. I emailed through the meter reading and then made the call to the sales team. I really had to build myself up to make this call, it’s very difficult to speak on the phone at the moment and say the words out loud about what happened,” she writes.
She spent an hour on the phone to Flogas and was put through to three different teams incorrectly and had to repeat her story each time.
“It was harrowing, both on me and on the Flogas employees. Not once did anyone say that they would call me back at a more convenient time. After one hour nothing was sorted so I had to end the call,” she writes.
She then spent the next 40 minutes trying to find the contact details of the managing director of Flogas.
“I eventually found them and sent him an email to beg him to set up a bereavement process to protect other customers and his employees from this experience. I have emailed twice and both times got his Out Of Office – once for holidays and another for an event he was at. I understand he is a busy man but as a human being, surely he could have contacted his team and asked them to call me?”
[ Dublin house prices are slipping. What is going on?Opens in new window ]
To make things worse, our reader adds that “during this time, my late husband is now receiving both late charges and letters in the post to let him know he has an unpaid bill, both dated after I first made contact with Flogas so internally they are not speaking to each other. It’s hard enough to still receive post for him but to then read that it’s from a company which I’ve been dealing with already makes it even more difficult. The late payment charge is €12.30.”
At the time of writing, she says the emails between her and the Flogas customer service team were still continuing “and they continue to ask me to call which I now refuse to do so and ask for someone to call me, unsurprisingly no one does.”
She adds that “out of sheer desperation” she tracked down the email address of a director who put her in contact with a senior customer service agent “who asked me for all the same details that I have already sent through, death cert, phone number, availability and yet again asked me to call their sales team. Incredibly this agent told me she’d been trying to call the number ‘on file’, which turns out to be my husband’s number, even though I have given my own mobile repeatedly.”
After reading her story, Pricewatch contacted Flogas and within hours the problem was resolved.
Our reader says that her “name is now on our original electricity account which is what I asked from the beginning. This started on May 20th and ended on June 30th. I am dealing with a lot of financial institutions in relation to my husband’s estate and not one of them has made it as difficult as Flogas so I do not want anyone else to go through this. It should be a legal requirement to have a bereavement process for customers where you deal with one person from beginning to end. I have spent the last few weeks in a constant panic that the electricity is going to be cut off as I had no trust that Flogas knew what they were doing. Not something you want to have to think about at a time like this. What I wonder is, had you not got involved, where would this have ended up? I currently feel very vulnerable and exposed, having lost my husband and there’s a sense of being taken advantage of, this feeling has been compounded by Flogas.”
The company subsequently sent us a statement. This is what it said in full.
“We have been in contact directly with this customer to apologise for the experience they have had, which fell short of our standards. We have now confirmed to her that her late husband’s account has been closed, with a new account established in her own name on the same contractual terms. The final bill on the old account will be cancelled.
“Changing the name on a customer’s account for any reason unfortunately requires a process known as a Change of Legal Entity and while this process involves a number of necessary steps, including setting up a new account, and closing the old account, our internal handling of this particular case did not move quickly enough. We are reviewing how we can reduce timelines for requests like this, specifically in the circumstances surrounding a bereavement in future.”
