SMART signing up customers without their permission!

murrayj

A friend said he heard something on the Gerry Ryan show last week to the effect that SMART are signing up customers without their permission.

Apparently rogue sales-people can forge the customer signatures on a contract and then get their commission on the sale! The customer doesn't know anything about it until they experience a bungled changeover or get a bill from SMART. Unbelievable!

I didn't hear the show myself - havent seen anything about it elsewhere in the media - anybody got details?

Sponge Bob

The rogue salesman for any company needs the account number otherwise the story is correct and I heard the piece . Thats why you never show them your bill (account number printed on it) on the doorstep. The biggest gang of Rogue Salesmen in Ireland is the eircom winback shower, what a bunch

If rogue has no account number he can do nothing.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Mmm I heard the repeat of that show this morning... some guy from Smart was on saying the sales guy in question had been sacked and they're taking measures to stop this kind of thing happening again.

Creamy Goodness

they signed us up to their telephone service without consent of the bill payer.

this is the jist of the CS call.

CS: hi, do you know you can save €€€'s from moving to eircom.
Me: yes.
CS: would you like for this to happen.
Me: it's not really my choice, can you ring back at a time when the bill payer is here and let him decide?
CS: sure.

month and a half passed and got out itemised eircom bill, there was no phone calls on it. two days later a smart bill popped through the door.

murrayj

Cremo wrote:

they signed us up to their telephone service without consent of the bill payer.

this is the jist of the CS call.

CS: hi, do you know you can save €€€'s from moving to eircom.
Me: yes.
CS: would you like for this to happen.
Me: it's not really my choice, can you ring back at a time when the bill payer is here and let him decide?
CS: sure.

month and a half passed and got out itemised eircom bill, there was no phone calls on it. two days later a smart bill popped through the door.

What a nightmare! Did you give SMART your account number? Did you consider suing them? You would have a very good case to take them to the cleaners. The only risk is that SMART will probably be bankrupt by the time your case would come up. Their Share price has completely collapsed in the last few months.

I teach in a school where the Dept. of Education forced us to use either Digiweb or SMART. 2 years later after numerous cock-ups we still don't have any service. These guys are complete gangsters. I got eircom at home, and had it within 4 days - not a problem since. The crazy thing is that the school is paying dial-up charges for the last two years. If the Dept. had let us go with eircom, we would have saved all the dial-up charges. Crazy!

Mountjoy Mugger

What's this got to do with Broadband?

murrayj

Mountjoy Mugger wrote:

What's this got to do with Broadband?

We have been trying to get Broadband in the school. I was also shocked when I realised that SMART could take any account away from an eircom customer without their permission. This could happen to any of us... I can't imagine anything worse than losing my Broadband connection to these gangsters and having to wait weeks or months to get it reconnected.

Creamy Goodness

murrayj wrote:

What a nightmare! Did you give SMART your account number? Did you consider suing them? You would have a very good case to take them to the cleaners. The only risk is that SMART will probably be bankrupt by the time your case would come up. Their Share price has completely collapsed in the last few months.

nope, my dad dealt with it all and was happy to get a cheque for the call charges and got an extra 50% off them aswell

1huge1

all the same i find this very hard to believe

paulm17781

1huge1 wrote:

all the same i find this very hard to believe

I know some people who used to work in Eircon and this kind of thing happened a lot. I think BT used to do it also. Not sure if it still happens so much.

Foxwood

paulm17781 wrote:

I know some people who used to work in Eircon and this kind of thing happened a lot. I think BT used to do it also. Not sure if it still happens so much.

Eircom at one time were the worst slammers, as eircom reps already had access to the eircom account numbers needed to change someone back.

In the case of any other provider that I've heard about that are accused of slamming, it seems to be down to rogue agents acting on commission rather than being so widespread as to be policy, as it was with eircom.

paulm17781

Foxwood, that is the impression I got too. I don't think is was Smart or BT signing people up. I think it was agents doing their best to get commission.

murrayj

paulm17781 wrote:

Foxwood, that is the impression I got too. I don't think is was Smart or BT signing people up. I think it was agents doing their best to get commission.

I'm sorry, but I take this quite seriously. I certainly don't want my telephone or Broadband account to be transferred to a bunch of amateurs without my permission. I don't care if they were "doing their best" to get commission. And I don't care how cheap they promise me the service will be. In my view it's just not worth it if they foul up your service.

There is absolutely no doubt that Smart were caught doing this - they were forced to apologise on RTE. Once of the previous posters on this thread even suggested in can happen over the phone, just by talking to these guys.

Foxwood

murrayj wrote:

I'm sorry, but I take this quite seriously. I certainly don't want my telephone or Broadband account to be transferred to a bunch of amateurs without my permission. I don't care if they were "doing their best" to get commission. And I don't care how cheap they promise me the service will be. In my view it's just not worth it if they foul up your service.

There is absolutely no doubt that Smart were caught doing this - they were forced to apologise on RTE. Once of the previous posters on this thread even suggested in can happen over the phone, just by talking to these guys.

Nobody is saying that it isn't a serious issue. The question is whether it was an individual employee "acting on his own initiative", or whether it was official practice condoned by a company. If it was officially condoned by the company, the agent in question wouldn't have been fired, and there would be a hell of a lot more cases of it going on. And you wouldn't have heard about it from the Gerry Ryan show before someone mentioned it on boards.ie.

Ever since other companies have been let into this market, there have been allegations of slamming against just about every telecomms company. Comreg has even issued official sanctions against a certain large provider, if memory serves.

spurious

Best thing I ever did moving to Smart - wish I'd been conned into it ages ago.

Abc1

Hi All,

Interesting thread (though as someone pointed out nothing to do with bb)..

Surprised this hasn't been brought up by any of you!

http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=9713831

Best,
Brian

dub45

murrayj wrote:

I'm sorry, but I take this quite seriously. I certainly don't want my telephone or Broadband account to be transferred to a bunch of amateurs without my permission. I don't care if they were "doing their best" to get commission. And I don't care how cheap they promise me the service will be. In my view it's just not worth it if they foul up your service.

There is absolutely no doubt that Smart were caught doing this - they were forced to apologise on RTE. Once of the previous posters on this thread even suggested in can happen over the phone, just by talking to these guys.

It is very difficult to belive that you are not being disingenuous in the tone of your posts in this thread and that you wish to embarass Smart to the maximum.

It is clear from the content of your posts in this thread http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054950617 that you are pretty familiar with the broadband world and you know very well that your broadband account cannot be transferred without your express permission - indeed there was no mention of broadband being transferred in this particular incident.

i look forward to the same shock horror being expressed on your part in relation the recent 'misbehaviour' of Eircom wholesale or will you have to wait for your friend to tell you about that one too before you start another hysterical thread?

Companies know that this type of behaviour does them no good as is evidenced by the report in today's Sunday Tribune.

SMART Telecom says it has tightened its internal controls after it emerged that one of its sales representatives had been switching customers from other telecoms providers to Smart without their consent.
Ciaran Casey, Smart's chief operating officer, said the sales rep was dismissed two weeks ago when it was discovered that he was "slamming" customers from other operators.

"We held our hands up. . .we're not making any excuses, " he said.

................The Smart slamming incident involved a small number of customers but has caused some embarrassment for the company as it bids to establish itself as the number one alternative to Eircom.

Casey said Smart had quality controls in place to ensure its sales reps were not mis-selling its services and that the company "regretted" what happened. "Any kind of slamming like that we take very seriously. We can't tolerate that behaviour, " he said.

The company has instituted new practices to ensure it doesn't happen again, Casey said. "We're going to send a signed copy of the customer authorisation form in future and we have upped the percentage of quality calls we make."

A spokeswoman for Comreg said it had discussed the slamming incident with Smart after receiving complaints.

"With any of the operators, if any issue does arise we will speak to them. There have been discussions with Smart and they have rectified the situation, " she said.

As Spurious points out above there are loads of people who wish they could transfer to Smart but guess who is standing in their way?

cramp

I can tell you that this going on..... 6 weeks back a TALK TALK rep foned our house and talked to my "other half" she said that she wouldn't sign up , and she would have to talk to me.... i said "NO".. 2 weeks later we got a letter saying something like " thank you for switching to TALK TALK, there a small delay in connecting you...anyway i tried to ring them and after 20 mins of waiting gave up!!!
another week later we get the same type of letter... i ring them again, and wait the full 20mins for them to answer, i explain to them about the letters, and they tell me " the computers are down and we have no info at the moment . we we will ring u back"...did they fook! another week later we get a letter saying we have been connected for the past week!!!
I FLIPPED the lid..... waited AGAIN 20 mins to be connected, read them the riot act.... they apologised and said that it wasn't their policy..... they told me that i would have to Ring Eircom and rejoin Eircom... i informed them that Under NO circumstances were they to send ANY bill of any sort to this address as they HIJACKED my line.... i then rang COM REG and they told me that this was happening quite a lot........ iam now considering where i stand regarding legal action...after all if any of us were to start interfering with our neighbours phones ..wouldn't we be charged with something


cramp

Sponge Bob

Smart fessed up and sacked the salesman. They accepted it was slamming . See

http://www.tribune.ie/article.tvt?_scope=Tribune/Business/Business%20Week&id=46638&SUBCAT=Tribune/Business&SUBCATNAME=Business

Foxwood

cramp wrote:

I can tell you that this going on..... 6 weeks back a TALK TALK rep foned our house and talked to my "other half" she said that she wouldn't sign up , and she would have to talk to me.... i said "NO".. 2 weeks later we got a letter saying something like " thank you for switching to TALK TALK, there a small delay in connecting you...anyway i tried to ring them and after 20 mins of waiting gave up!!!

According to Comreg, your existing provider is supposed to send you an "anti-slamming letter" basically saying "we understand you've changed providers. To allow the change to go ahead you don't need to take any action, but if your don't want the change to go ahead, please call us at 1800-xxxxxx".

It seems like a simple measure, but it sounds like it's not being done. It's almost as if someone wants the slamming to succeed.

dub45

Foxwood wrote:

According to Comreg, your existing provider is supposed to send you an "anti-slamming letter" basically saying "we understand you've changed providers. To allow the change to go ahead you don't need to take any action, but if your don't want the change to go ahead, please call us at 1800-xxxxxx".

It seems like a simple measure, but it sounds like it's not being done. It's almost as if someone wants the slamming to succeed.

when I changed my telephony to UTV some years ago I certainly got such a letter from Eircom.

As a matter of interest how can they change supplier without an account number or is there a way for a 'rogue' employee to get an account number?

masteroftherealm

murrayj wrote:

There is absolutely no doubt that Smart were caught doing this - they were forced to apologise on RTE. Once of the previous posters on this thread even suggested in can happen over the phone, just by talking to these guys.

No SMART were not caught doing this. A single sales person was.
God talk about tarring a group with 1 brush jeez!
This is not huge news. It was the blunder of 1 sales person!

As for cremo, thats impossible to happen without you or someone giving them your acc number!

masteroftherealm

dub45 wrote:

As a matter of interest how can they change supplier without an account number or is there a way for a 'rogue' employee to get an account number?

Not unless its eircom in which case they already have your acc number. (for switchback to eircom scams)