Closing of Talk To Eir Forum 29th March 2019

tayto lover

The Specialist,

I don’t agree with you on this.
Joe Duffy has many thousands of listeners and no company can afford bad publicity as well as the fact that listeners who hear the complaints will not be inclined to do business with a poorly run company that has no time for its customers.

Anteayer

I'd agree with taking your grievances to ComReg, TDs or media, but I wouldn't get ratty with front line staff.

B_ecke_r

absolutely nobody cares that you are going to call Joe Duffy, and to be honest half the staff given their age wouldn't have the first clue who he even his. 

I have experience at many levels of a call centre and the fact is you get ratty and you get nowhere. 

staff will go above and beyond for the genuinely nice people who they've feel hard done by not some condescending eejit who thinks he's above even speaking to a  CSR 

B_ecke_r

B_ecke_r wrote: »

absolutely nobody cares that you are going to call Joe Duffy, and to be honest half the staff given their age wouldn't have the first clue who he even his. 

I have experience at many levels of a call centre and the fact is you get ratty and you get nowhere. 

staff will go above and beyond for the genuinely nice people who they've feel hard done by not some condescending eejit who thinks he's above even speaking to a  CSR 

I don’t get this. So you would go above and beyond for someone that was nice? Therefore, customer service reps DO have the ability to resolve a customers issue but just pick and choose when they want to do their job?

Why can’t you just do your job regardless?

B_ecke_r

they will do their job, going above and beyond is something extra. if someone came into a pub and started treating the staff aggressively he's getting kicked out not a nice cold pint, no reason people should be allowed act like warriors on the phone and expect to get same level of help as someone who has an ounce of manners.

CSRs are not there to be abused down the phone - nobody is aware of the wait times more than them and its impacting nobody else more than them. 7.5 hour days without a break in calls (not counting lunch here) is a long and tiring day 

So the customer doesn’t get their issue resolved and has to again call a customer service number and hope they get through to someone after an hours hold and the cycle continues.

I get that some people can be absolute arseholes but there is serious frustration with eir customers regarding getting through on the phone. If above and beyond is possible, do it for everyone and save passing the buck to your next colleague.

It’s just a never ending circle of frustration with reps and customers trying to catch up with each other. Surely it’s easier to sort a problem and never hear from that customer again?

B_ecke_r

I don't believe passing the buck is what's going on here though at the moment.

Serious lack of Knowledge due to the mass redundancies in both eir and hcl 

they say it take "six months average for a CSR to get up to speed" in reality it takes much longer than this - six months will allow you to answer general queries and have a good grasp of navigating the systems and your call quality. 

eir's processes have not changed - get rid of the Indian company all you want but the reason for the wait times are the processes and systems HCL or anyone was/is working with. 

obviously they let too many people go too fast but how would you feel 

if you were told your job was being relocated just before Xmas? would you stick around til December or look for a new job straight away in a panic? this is a mass failure in the process. 

the point is at the moment I don't believe the staff are passing the buck I believe thay have no escalation points and that's why these issues are continuing .

Accidentally

Strawberry Milkshake wrote: »

I don’t get this. So you would go above and beyond for someone that was nice? Therefore, customer service reps DO have the ability to resolve a customers issue but just pick and choose when they want to do their job?

Why can’t you just do your job regardless?

You're missing the fact that people are people. If the person on the far end of the call comes across as reasonable and friendly, you're a damn sight more likely to go out of your way to help them in any way you can. If the person has a rant or an officious attitude, you will stick strictly to the official script. Always been the way in any customer facing role.

tayto lover

That’s if you’re talking to a call answerer though.
I’m talking about the hierarchy in the company listening to a radio show where customers are ringing in to state what a rubbish company it is and why nobody should have anything to do with it. They wouldn’t like that one teeny weeny bit. Customers are money to them.

B_ecke_r

AFAIK at least once a year Joe does a eir special and nothing really changes

How many articles has Conor Pope written?

mgbgt1978

Oh no !!!!
I may never get asked for my mother's Maiden Name again :eek::eek::eek:.

messinkiapina

To be fair, it makes brilliant business sense. I almost signed up Eir in the past but didn't and never will on the strength of the awful experiences I've seen posted on here. I'd want to kill it and bury it from plain sight too if I were making business decisions at Eir.

swoofer

eir taking off this web page shows what they think of customer care and dont they have a new ceo in place and they have to make an impact.

Mike Oxlong

swoofer wrote: »

eir taking off this web page shows what they think of customer care and dont they have a new ceo in place and they have to make an impact.

John Delaney might be a perfect fit here you know!

Mint Sauce

Dont recall ever having to use this forum as a method of contacting Eir, but am a current Eir Customer. Was already thinking of changing provider, and this decision is adding to that.

The fact that some queries or services cant be dealt with at shop floor level, now the closure of this service, means probable only route is currently having to wait 30 minutes in a call queue. Doesn't really appeal to me, the sounds of it doesn't appeal to many here, nor does it sound like work towards improving the customer experience.

Really hope someone at the top of the Eir tree reads this forum, and considers the effect of their companys decision.

Up Donegal

I'm sure that if the powers that be in eir were to read some of the horror stories in this board, their first concern would be to eliminate the cause of all the dissatisfaction that has been told here.

Anteayer

Up Donegal wrote: »

I'm sure that if the powers that be in eir were to read some of the horror stories in this board, their first concern would be to eliminate the cause of all the dissatisfaction that has been told here.

You'd think so, I mean if they read and responded to these forums properly they would be having their market research and snag lists handed to them for free! You have to pay a fortune to go out and do focus groups and surveys to get the kind of information that's coming back entirely free of charge in these forums.

I can appreciate they're in a state of flux due to the changes in their customer service structure from the outsourced stuff back in our again, but they could  still handle it in a much more positive way.

The first thing they should do is put their hands up and admit that there's a temporary issues. They've only recently done that. Then you can begin to resolve it and keep your customers on side. People are willing to bear with all sorts of disruptions be it late flights, road works and so on because they know there's something being improved. Just giving people bland lines like "we are experiencing unusual call volumes" is really not how you do it.

A lot of their call volumes would also be radically reduced if they stopped routing people through to 1901 to do simple things. A lot of stuff could be done online in self service - particularly stupid things like removing bundles / add ons or whatever from call plans on mobiles and so on or activating / deactivating services.

You should be able to log in and add or remove anything from a plan, activate whatever services you need to and so on without going anywhere near customer services helplines. They're obviously trying to route all switching off of services into a sales pitch on 1901 with a loyalty team but they don't have the capacity to do that right now and it's resulting in serious problems for customers.

They have a decent website and they have good technology available to them, so I can't really see why most things can't be done directly on the web.
Even logging faults should be doable online with a proper ticketing system without going anywhere near a call centre.

You'd think that the priority would be to automate absolutely everything that can be automated and reduce the queues dramatically. Even the IVR used to be able to do an awful lot more than it can now. I remember being able to log and track faults on 1901 without speaking to anyone. What happened to all of that stuff? It's like the technology went backwards. There was a whole fancy voice recognition system that was able to do all sorts of stuff without resorting to putting you onto an operator. Now it's just hold the line for hours until you speak to an agent.

It should also be possible to book a call back, so you're not waiting for hours and hours on hold.

Also use the retail network!! There are completely competent people in Eir stores up and down the country who could easily sort out a lot of these problems. It seems like an ideal thing to give them the ability to respond to queries like cancellations and so on.

Also they need to drop this nonsense of trying to force people to speak to a customer loyalty team to cancel before they move network. All that's doing is causing confusion and people are porting out with a very bad taste in their mouth having been made jump through hoops. 

This is an industry with a lot of churn (people swapping between networks) and if you lose a customer they might eventually come back. If you put them through hoops and it feels like they're being penalised for switching provider, you might have lost them for good.

I moved network without giving any notice and I've always done that in the past. Once I was out of minimum contract terms, I would just approach a new operator and port out. That always worked and now all of a sudden there's mention of having to call up or write in on paper to give notice. All this stuff is absolutely frustrating.

You keep customers by providing good quality, competitive services.

Johnboy1951

I just popped in here to say Bye Bye eir.

As soon as my contract is up this time I will cease to be a customer.

This home has had a service from eir and its predecessors since 1983.

The most trouble I have had has been in the last year.
Trying to get someone on chat or end of phone that had the least clue what anything meant resulted in great frustration.

I understand why customers get short with eir frontline staff.
It is frustration caused by eir themselves.
It is to be expected given the lack of any access for the customer to someone who knows anything about the products or even more importantly can do anything at all about a problem.

So bye bye eir, eircom and P&T.
You finally found that last straw and used it effectively!

Henry Ford III

Good riddance. Your customer service is an utter joke.

jimmynokia

It gets better I had Carolan Lennon publicly tell me to email her last week (22nd March) on twitter to solve my issue, She still has not responded. Shambles of a company..

B_ecke_r

jimmynokia wrote: »

It gets better I had Carolan Lennon publicly tell me to email her last week (22nd March) on twitter to solve my issue, She still has not responded. Shambles of a company..

feasible she has more to be doing than dealing with your bill no?

I am sure you will get a response