The magic is gone out of Smart

Jor

This is a copy of an e-mail I have just sent to Smart.
They don't need Eircom to sabotage them. The can do it on their own.

"I regret that I must ask you to stop the transfer of our home telephone line from Eircom to your combined Residential/Broadband service.
I was looking forward to using your service but over the last few weeks, I have lost all confidence with your customer back-up.

Having waited approx. 18 months for your service to become available through my local exchange ( due to Eircom delay tactics ), one of your sales reps called to the house. We set up the details to change our home line to Smart Broadband. When asked, she said it should take no more than six weeks. The next contact was about six weeks later when another sales rep called asking if we wanted to transfer to Smart.

I left it another two weeks without any contact from yourselves. I then sent an e-mail through your web site asking if any progress was being made.
I received a reply asking for our current Eircom account number as they did not have it. I forwarded this straight away.

The following week, I was contacted by customer service who again tried to set up a Smart account. During this, your computer system crashed. He rang me back and tried again. I was away from home at that time so did not have all the details necessary. We completed this the following day. While talking to him, I had to remind him about delivery of the modem and notification of our new phone number. He had no information of this himself but said he would arrange to have the modem dispatched immediately. When he tried to transfer me to another person to do the recorded verification process, the line went dead. He rang back and put me through then.

I assumed this would be the end of all the hiccups, however when I got back home I found that you had posted me THREE different direct debit confirmations. Each had my name, bank account number and three different Smart account numbers. I contacted customer services as soon as I could but because of the time of day there was a big queue of calls so I left my contact details on the message service. I heard nothing the following two days.

I rang again first thing (9am) this morning to be sure of getting through. The person was very efficient and was able to tell me that the first two Smart account numbers (20035xxx & 20035xxx) had no information on the line (though presumably there is enough info to set up the direct debits from my bank account). The third number had all the information but I would need to do the recorded verification again. She put me on hold to transfer me .......... and the phone went dead.

I rang the number of the person who I had delt with last week. Someone else answered the phone but they said they would get him to ring me back straight away.
An hour later, another person rang me. They said I would have to do the verbal verification again. I told her I had decided not to go ahead with it as I could not trust the company after all this. She said I would have to contact customer service myself straight away and cancel the order. She could not transfer me .............because when she tried to transfer calls, the phone went dead!

As I received no confirmation that any action has been taken to actually change our line from Eircom, there should be no problem with this.
I will phone customer service at 9am on Friday 11th to confirm this."

adrian522

I've been there and done that with smart before, however the service is quite good once you get it set up,

jor el

Sounds like you've had a pretty hard time of it. I'd advise you contact your bank and give them all three Smart account numbers and instruct them not to accept any direct debits with those account references in them, just in case, but I've not heard anything about Smart over charging customers (or non-customers).

Any chance you could ring Eircom and make sure there's no request for transfer of service on your account? I'm not sure if you can do this or if they'll tell you anything but it might be worth a shot. I have heard stories of people who got calls from Smart, among other companies, and even though they didn't explicitly agree to anything their phone services were transferred. I think some of them were on Gerry Ryan or Joe Duffy about it.

Jor

Thanks for the advice, jor el.
I was planning to contact the bank to stop any payments.
If smart tried to ignore me, that would give them the idea.

PS Are we related?
I'm Jor. I also live in an existential wasteland. It's called Waterford.