SBP: "Eircom refunds after overcharging Meath woman"

Eurorunner

Eircom refunds after overcharging Meath woman

21/11/04 00:00

By Kathleen Barrington
A Co Meath woman whose telephone bills soared dramatically after a salesman persuaded her to switch back to Eircom from a rival operator looks set to receive a €500 refund after raising her concerns with The Sunday Business Post.

Betty O'Connell said she had been promised a refund of about €278 to cover the two months for which she was overcharged by being put on the wrong Eircom call package.

She has also been promised a further €140 refund to compensate her for being wrongly charged on Eircom services while she was with the rival operator. She expects other adjustments to bring the total refund to €500.


For three weeks, O'Connell had been asking Eircom to explain why her phone bills had increased after she switched back to its Talktime package.

She said she finally got a response last Monday after this newspaper raised her concerns with the company.

"Before they got a call from you, I could not get them to acknowledge that I even existed," she said. O'Connell switched from Eircom to IFA Telecom in October 2003 and noticed a "definite improvement in her bills''. Eircom then "bombarded'' her seeking her business back, she said.

Finally, last August, she agreed to meet a member of Eircom's 'winback' sales team, which is dedicated to winning back customers who have defected to rival operators.

This newspaper has reported complaints that Eircom's so-called Feet on the Street (FOTS) sales team employs aggressive sales tactics in an effort to win back defectors.

O'Connell claimed the FOTS salesman assured her that she could reduce her bills by a further 20 per cent if she switched back to the company's Talktime package.

The salesman volunteered the 20 per cent figure after looking at her IFA Telecom bills for about an hour, she said. All three of her bills increased after switching to Talktime. On one of her phone lines, charges almost doubled, she said.

O'Connell called Eircom several times seeking an explanation, but staff could not tell her why her bill had increased.

A spokesman for Eircom apologised for the delayed response.

He said Eircom relied on information from customers before putting them on a Talktime package, and that the company's salesman would have given an indicative figure for the savings to be made. He confirmed that Eircom had now "adjusted the package in this case''.

O'Connell said Eircom had since conceded that she was overcharged after being put on the wrong Talktime package by a salesman who is no longer with the company.

She said Eircom had also conceded that it had continued to charge her for a service she no longer used during the ten months she was with IFA Telecom.

viking

From the "Last Post" section of the SBP:

McRedmond gets mobile

Last Post agents attending the Wireless Wednesday event in Dublin's Berkeley Court Hotel last week were flummoxed at a last minute change of speakers in the line-up.

The topic for the Eircom-sponsored evening was "What is the future for MVNO's [sic] - Brand or Technology?", and flyers promised Eircom's commercial director, David McRedmond, as a panelist.

The day before the event McRedmond's name was removed from the list, and no substitute given.

Now, it is no secret that Eircom has ambitions to break into the mobile phone market, and that the most plausible way of doing this is by piggybacking on another mobile operator's network (becoming a mobile virtual network operator [MVNO]). But first, the telecoms regulator must force competition on the market.

The chairman of the fixed line monopoly, Dr Mr Sir Capt Tony O'Reilly Esq, has been proclaiming up close and down street that the mobile duopoly must be addressed (bless). O'Reilly waits on tenterhooks as the regulator prepares to make its decision this month.

All highly technical stuff - but what of McRedmond?

With Cathal Magee, managing director of Eircom Retail, overheard whispering that the telco is making shapes to take over Meteor, perhaps wise Eircom had second thoughts about putting someone on the podium to field uncomfortable questions about its aspirations.

Ronan|Raven

BrianD and Dahamsta kindly keep it somewhat civil please