The secret to our customer service

Energy explained

When you sign up to Octopus, you’re trusting us to get energy to your home. We work hard to honour that trust through outrageously good customer service.

Of course we don’t get it right every time, but the way we look after customers means we’ve been Which? Recommended a record-breaking eight years running.

Here’s what you can expect from us.

Real stories from our customers

The way we do customer service means we can really get to know the human at the other end of the line. Sometimes real friendships blossom.

Settle in for story time with energy specialist, Andre:

The best way to understand our service is to hear it from our customers themselves. Here’s an excerpt from a letter our CEO Greg received recently from a customer.

They're highly vulnerable, and were facing dangerous circumstances at home. Trouble with their old energy supplier was making everything worse, so they called us...

I am compelled to reach out and share the absolutely extraordinary story of how Octopus Energy and three exceptional employees went above and beyond to resolve a series of dangerous circumstances I have faced since moving in due to another supplier’s account errors, switching problems, and meter issues.
Mr Jackson, your staff quite possibly saved my life this weekend.
For avoidance of doubt, this all occurred prior to my switch – what companies have you heard of that do this for customers before they are even “officially” their customer.
These guys didn’t need to do this – they had no obligations…But they LISTENED.

How is something like that possible in a company with seven million customers?

1) Every one of our energy experts has the training to solve a huge array of tricky problems, start to finish

The days of waiting on hold as you are passed between a hundred different departments are over. We’ve spent years putting together a super-capable, super-friendly team. We train our energy experts to ensure they know Octopus inside and out. So whatever your question is, the chances are one person can solve it from start to finish.

2) Every customer is looked after by a dedicated team of around 10 people

Each team is like its own micro-business, completely responsible for looking after a group of customers – so even in a business of 7 million customers, you’re going to speak to the same small team of people every time.

It lets us keep closer to you, to crack the toughest problems, form real connections, and even send a bunch of flowers when you're going through a hard time.

Meet our London team

3) The right tools for the job

We ensure that all our energy experts are fully supported by our world-beating tech system: Kraken. Our home grown tech platform allows us to navigate all things energy in one place.

It helps us preemptively check for account issues to catch them early, while also diagnosing and finding solutions for any surprise issues that do crop up (while integrating and managing our cutting edge green tech too). These are just a few of the reasons that Kraken now supports 30 million energy accounts!

4) Responsibility, all the way up

We put a high price on autonomy and responsibility. We’re trained to problem-solve – not stick to a prescribed process – as we work to find the solution that works for you. It’s important that our experts have the discretion to decide if someone needs specially tailored help, or even a bunch of flowers when they're going through a hard time.

We take pride in the fact that everybody at Octopus is responsible for looking after customers. You can reach out to Greg and a whole host of senior Octopus faces and get a response. After all, when something goes wrong, the top leaders in the biz are the ones responsible for fixing it.

5) Cutting out the middle-Octopus

an image of some high tech octopus account screens

We work extremely hard to make things so easy that you rarely have to reach out to us at all. We pour our hearts into making sure that our products work really, really well.

It also means giving you control over things like your direct debit payments, building a five-star app with faff-busting, self-serving goodness, and making sure that all our communications, from emails to blogs and FAQs, are clear and carefully crafted. Doing all this helps ensure that you only have to reach out to us when it really matters.

And in turn, that frees up our team to focus on the most important stuff: fixing the thorniest issues and spending time speaking to customers.

6) Providing extra help where it’s needed

Everything we do is geared around making space for the important stuff. The last few years have been incredibly tough in the world of energy, with dirty gas driving sky high prices.

With that in mind, our energy experts have been all hands on deck using our £30 million Octo Assist Fund to give extra help where it’s most needed: including standing charge holidays, cosy heated blankets, loaning out high-tech thermal cameras out to spot heat loss in homes, and home energy health checks from our energy helpers.

On top of that, we're on hand with a tonne of meaningful, specially-tailored advice, a kind listening ear and a wealth of understanding for anyone who needs it.

When your energy company gives a damn that you haven't used the heating once over winter because of price hikes & cares whether you're cold or not.
😭💜🐙 pic.twitter.com/3stKChAkVU
— NEKO // Lizbit 🌻✌👽 (@oritelovely) February 19, 2022

7) We make stuff that brings a bit of joy to people

an image of our wheel of fortune landing on £64

From the little touches – like playing the UK #1 hit from the year you turned 14 for a hit of nostalgia on the rare occasion we put you on hold, or giving you a wheel of fortune to spin every time you send us a meter reading. To the big stuff: like Saving Sessions – which saw our customers earn £5.4 million last winter by cutting down energy, and making the whole system greener in the process.

8) Everything we do across the entire Octoverse is all done with you in mind

an image of a telegraph headline that daus 'in a warehouse in Slough, 'mad scientists' vie to be the Tesla of heat pumps'

Because looking after customers is everyone’s job – from Greg and our senior team to every marketer, app developer and engineer – everything we do is built with the customer in mind, whether we’re building new, hyper-efficient heat pumps, or installing solar panels.

This is what inspires our innovative smart tariffs; and green energy-building initiatives like Fan Club – which gives communities 50% off their energy when local wind turbines are turning; and our one-of-a-kind Zero Bills Homes scheme, where we’re working with developers to build houses whose owners will pay nothing at all for their energy – that’s right, we’re an energy business that ultimately wants to make energy totally free.

Ultimately, we’re a team of humans. We’re on hand to understand and adapt, tailoring our help to fit your needs, but this also means we’ll occasionally make mistakes. Even if we get it right 99% of the time, with 7 million customers, you can expect a few slip ups, especially when energy is still full of creaky legacy systems.

Still, whatever the issue, we can promise that we’ll do all we can to fix it. We do all this and more in our quest for cheaper, greener energy for everybody; it’s only fair, especially given the trust you put in us.