Stay Away From UtilityOne
Published by Kev January 10th, 2006 in Australia, rants, reviews
If you’re moving within Australia, do yourself a favour and avoid UtilityOne, a company that offers to handle all your utility connections and disconnections for free. After giving it a go, I found the service overpriced.
It all begins with a box on your lease application. “Tick here and UtilityOne will contact you to arrange your utility disconnections. This is a free service.” I’d allowed my skepticism to rule in past moves, but this time I decided to give it a shot. Within a few days of lodging my application, UtilityOne called me on my mobile phone to get all the details.
The phone call was friendly and straightforward, and basically consisted of confirming my details and then asking me if I’d like them to handle the migration of each of my utilities in turn: electricity, gas, telephone and water.
Though the company bills itself as an expert in dealing with utilities, that expertise doesn’t mean it can deal with lots of different companies. For each utility (electricity, gas, water, telephone), it has selected one or two providers that it works with. If you want to use someone else, UtilityOne can’t help you.
I use Origin Energy for my electricity and gas, because its GreenEarth programs let me pay a little extra for services based on renewable resources with zero greenhouse emissions. UtilityOne doesn’t deal with Origin Energy.
I use iiNet for my home telephone, because I can bundle its competitively priced telephone services with its superior ADSL service and save money. UtilityOne only deals with Telstra.
There isn’t a lot of competition for water services in Melbourne, so UtilityOne was able to hook me up with City West Water. But two months later I received a water bill for my old address. City West Water says UtilityOne never contacted them about disconnecting it.
So I gave UtilityOne a call about it. Here’s what the helpful agent on the line said:
Ah, I see what happened. We didn’t organize the disconnection of your water service because you didn’t ask us to.
So apparently, although the company will proactively ask to arrange the connections of each of your utilities, you have to ask for disconnections yourself if you want them. I guess disconnections don’t equate to referral dollars.
To be fair, a quick poll around the office hasn’t indicated that any of the other companies offering similar services in Australia do much better. My advice: If you want something done right…
Interestingly, this post is currently the highest ranked Google search result for “UtilityOne” after the official website itself.
Oh, well. I wish I’d stumbled on your site BEFORE I ticked the box! My girlfriend and I have just bought a house in Brisbane and the UtilityOne option was aided and abetted by the conveyancing firm doing our legals, who had it as an option on their letter of instructions. Like you, I usually steer away from these things, but thought “What the hell?” on this occasion.
Our experience was very similar to yours- it would have been simpler and easier to have made the arrangements ourselves, given the amount of times we had to go back to Utility One to get them to correct their errors.
I am, however, deeply satisfied to see that your post remains amongst the highest ranked Google search result for “UtilityOne” after the official website itself. Your line about their service being over-priced was very apt.
Many thanks for your post. I am moving in a couple of weeks, and will steer well clear of Utility One. I thought about using their service, but have no problem with doing it all myself.
I worked at Utility One and I can assure you that it is a great service. We deal with hundreds of customers a day, and in case you havent noticed, everyone makes mistakes! so a couple of people out of a thousand customers we deal with we may make a mistake with, well deal with it! What company has never made mistakes? and just because I use to work there doesnt mean anything, the people there are nice, however the managers are pretty rude. But every time we make a mistake, which isnt too often, we always give the customer a gift, to say sorry, For example, a customer recieved a free mobile just the other day, and it was a very expensive one. So stop being sooks and grow up. Every single company makes mistakes, so do something worthwhile with your time than just complain.
utility one connected all of my utilitys to my new home i found them to be very helpful. i was not familiar with the companies that they would connect me to and i voiced my uncertanties, they were nice enough to send me an e mail regarding all the details and special offers going on with the companies that they would connect me to if i was to accept their free help. the email was very easy to understand for someone who doesnt know that much about this sort of thing. i do not regret letting utility one connect my utilities as i am very happy with the companies that they have connected me to,and am glad i did not have to ring up all the different companies and get everything connected myself.
i would recommend to those who need their utilities connected to use utility ones free service.