A few weeks ago I changed my National Grid (NE US gas utility) autopay settings. When I finished the status was “Pending-Enrollment”.
I was a little disconcerted, since I had no confirmation that I’d configured it correctly or it would work. So today I checked the website to make sure it was active, and saw an overdue bill. That’s odd — the purpose of autopay is to avoid overdue bills and late payments. So I called, and was told autopay always takes a full billing cycle to activate. So every time someone sets up autopay they ‘miss’ a payment and National Grid charges a late fee. What an incentive to use the feature! Apparently if I’d set up autopay on the telephone, the rep might have warned me. But like, I’m sure, most people who use autopay, I followed what should be the most efficient path and used the website.
- Why does National Grid not activate autopay immediately?
- Why don’t they warn users on the website, something like, “We’re sorry, but our DirectPay system takes a full month to activate. To avoid a late fee, you should prepay your next bill now. If your bill hasn’t posted yet, try to pay at least last month’s amount as a guess. Again, we’re really sorry our system stinks so badly!”
The (helpful and efficient) phone rep could not either put through a manual payment or waive the late fee (due to their broken system), but gave me another number to call. That number was for an IVR payment system which took my CC info, charged me a $1.75 “Convenience Fee” — despite delivering no convenience — just charging me to fix National Grid’s institutional brokenness. But I’m sure those fees are mostly levied on people having trouble paying their bills. What a shitshow.
I thought I was calling a billing rep, who would push through a manual charge to my CC (already on file for autopay!) and waive the “late fee”, but of course the CPay IVR system did not offer to waive any fees. If I had known I’d have to punch in all those numbers and pay a fee, I would’ve paid on the website.
sigh