Sligo people "not sufficiently skilled" to work in call centres

Pawwed Rig

Pawwed Rig wrote: »

Blaming the pandemic and working from home for their poor customer service. What was their excuse last year for the appalling performance?

What was their excuse for the past 20, even 30 years?

Floppybits

Floppybits wrote: »

I have to agree with you. A call centre is a great starting off point, I would advise anyone looking to go down the IT route to do a few months in a call centre. I started my IT career in a call centre and right through out my career the experience I had there dealing with customer issues have helped when managing IT projects and gives you are great perspective when working with developers and being able to look at an application and say you will need to make that a bit simpler or you need to change this.

Perfect post!

I too started in a call centre. Some of my best friends I met whie working there. But while the work could be horrible at times, it gave a great grounding in many things.

robinbird

robinbird wrote: »

Curiously I don't think I've ever met anyone from Sligo either. Maybe they are not sufficiently abled for inter county travel.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson "Lisa, vampires are make-believe, like elves, gremlins, and people from Sligo."

Deleted User

Deleted User wrote: »

That explains why they have gotten so bad.

I've worked in several call centres, as an agent, as Junior management and as a consultant. The people in them all were lovely people but the difference in service was down to the processes not the people.

I went from a multi-national call centre to a startup. In the multi-national, if I needed to replace a customers cable or router, I filled out a form in Outlook, included the account details and clicked send and a cable got sent out.

In the startup, on my first day I had to put together my flat pack desk myself. A few days later i got a call and needed to replace a cable for customer. I asked my manager what was the process. He said "In the corner is a box of cables, then go to reception and get an envelope and a stamp, put the cable in, write on the address and give it back to the receptionist to go out.

If I had a router and a cable to send out to two different customers, it only takes a momentary lapse of focus(or lets face it, a hangover), for me to send the wrong one to the wrong customer.

Eir isn't a startup but they clearly didn't have rigid, fool-proof processes. So mistakes got made. Can't blame Sligo people for that - and thats coming from a Galwayman! :pac:

I worked in a 3 multinational callcentres. The customers were the same market ( uk / ireland) and were generally fine.

In the first callcentre, the process for sending out cables, CDs as well as floppy disks was a bit mental. For it's size, you yourself had to make the floppy disk (called the universal boot disk). This floppy disk was NOT a new blank floppy disk and had bad sectors on it, because it had been written to already a few time.

In the second callcentre, no cd's or anything were sent out.

In the third callcentre, a large multinational, the process for sending out small kits and components and cd's was complex but understandable.

jimgoose

robinbird wrote: »

..."Probably this is a mistake that we did make in choosing Sligo...... I think that was a challenge, it took us longer to train them"...

:pac::pac::pac: Fantastic stuff - that's like something "Reggie from the Blackrock Road" would come out with in one of his Twitter videos!

ChikiChiki

Its a call centre. How hard can it be. I think it was a comment made by the CEO to pass the book on her own failings to tackle bad customer service and implementing a better customer experience.

Being discussed on NewsTalk now.

jelutong

Just dealt with the Eir call centre in Sligo 30 minutes ago. Couldn’t fault the service.

ChikiChiki

ChikiChiki wrote: »

Its a call centre. How hard can it be.

It's not rocket science but it's very easy to get wrong. The startup I mentioned earlier had a backlog of about 5 thousand tickets and the CEO said if we got it down to 500 by the time we finished up on Christmas eve we would all get a bonus. I and many others worked late every night to work on them. By December 19th, it was down to 200 hundred.

On December 20th the head of Customer Care sent a christmas card to all our customers but didn't use BCC, so all 5000 customers could see their email address and 4999 others. Also the reply-to address in the email she sent went back to the ticketing system so on December the 21st we had a thousand new tickets, some just people saying thanks, but others saying "Why TF don't you know about BCC when sending emails".

Come Christmas Eve, there were over a thousand tickets so no bonus.

ChikiChiki wrote: »

I think it was a comment made by the CEO to pass the book on her own failings to tackle bad customer service and implementing a better customer experience.

The CEO should have pointed the failings at management, not blame a whole county for the failings.

Purple Mountain

givyjoe wrote: »

From the point of view of a seller, Paypal are utterly shocking. They make fraud exceptionally easy.

I never had any dispute with them before this and naively thought they'd protect their buyers.
I spent 2 months literally fighting, justifying, begging to be just heard.

Anyway, that's for another thread.
Would love to see a whistleblower type interview done with eir workers.

It’s all about saving face. Just like everything else though, eir are screwing even that up. Sligo having or never having had a call centre is irrelevant. Neither did Wexford till Eistech setup shop, but some half decent training and staff can do the job.

Honestly making it sound like the residents of Sligo are all brain dead monkeys when in fact eir are just lazy. I interviewed with them a few times & they always made it feel like training was never going to be provided in any exceptional capacity and therefore you should know what to do before you get in the door day 1.

MrMusician18

seamus wrote: »

This is nothing to do with Sligo, and everything to do with a culture problem in eir that has existed since day dot. The fact that CEO blames the quality of customer service on the staff says volumes about what management think about staff.

In my early days I worked in two companies that could not be more different in their reputation for customer service; Superquinn and eircom.

Superquinn's induction process consisted of two days. 1.5 days were spent discussing customer service. Literally. Drilling home the "customer is always right" culture that the business was built on. Roleplaying various scenarios about serving customer, responding to issues, etc. The other half day was the procedural company stuff, the job, etc. When you were working, performance was almost entirely focussed on customer interaction; whether you were pleasant and friendly to customers, whether you looked dour and unapproachable while working, whether customers specifically called you out for being helpful, etc. Issues like speed or accuracy less important.
Going above and beyond for a customer was the holy grail.

eircom's induction process (for a customer support role) was 1.5 days learning how to do sales and a half day learning about the company. That's it. The "support" training was being given access to a load of How-To documents to guide you through the issues you might have to deal with.
On the job, there were no customer service performance metrics. No customer satisfaction surveys, no ticketing systems that tracked whether a customer issue was fixed and how long it took to fix. The only metrics were how quickly you could finish a call, and how many sales you made (on a support call). They didn't care about anything else.
No training to deal with difficult customers. No discussion on customer satisfaction. Just "fix their sh1t quickly and try to sell them stuff while you have them". Going above and beyond was no desired. I spent an hour on a call with a guy in his 80s one day. He didn't really need anything fixed, just lonely and wanted a chat. I got called out for it and told it was way too long.

So it doesn't surprise me at all, that when this company went to set up a new call centre in Sligo from scratch, they made an absolute balls of it. Because eir has never, ever, understood what customer support is supposed to be.

That's not actually what she said. There are a number of people out there making what she said worse and rather ironically destroying sligos reputation for business in the process, odd behaviour for those that claim to represent the region. What she actually said was that it was a mistake to set up in Sligo and for management to expect their call centre to be running like a will oiled machine in 6 months. Especially when the talent pool they were pulling from was from retail and hospitality and had little to no experience in call center work. She admitted that this was a management failing.

KildareP

Atlantic Dawn wrote: »

Why have they not offshored this kind of work like Vodafone have?

Have you dealt with Vodafone's offshore customer service?
It is utterly diabolical.



Which explains why they were also visited along with Eir this week.



For the two biggest telecoms companies in this country, backed by some of the biggest global multinational telecoms companies, they are completely and utterly useless at actually doing what their entire company's existence is based upon - communicating.

KildareP

KildareP wrote: »

Have you dealt with Vodafone's offshore customer service?
It is utterly diabolical.



Which explains why they were also visited along with Eir this week.



For the two biggest telecoms companies in this country, backed by some of the biggest global multinational telecoms companies, they are completely and utterly useless at actually doing what their entire company's existence is based upon - communicating.

Vodafone has really gone to the dogs.

LineConsole

Blaming your low wage unskilled staff on the failure of a new office is really poor form. One or two staff can be a weak link, but an entire office? Nah, the buck stops with the management here. This smacks of a CEO who is too timid to address the managers that failed here, (including herself) and is throwing the little guy under the bus.

shesty

Eir are behaving as if this customer support issue is a new one, due to Covid difficulties only. It really is not!!! It's been going on for years now....one quick search for the many, many articles in the Irish Times on complaints received from readers about their difficulties with Eir will show that.



My own grandmother died in 2019.....her Eir account was in her name as she was a widow.When her family rang to close her account with Eir, they explained she was deceased and they wanted to close it off and the person on the other end of the phone said they could only talk to the account owner. It took 20 MINUTES of explaining that the dead person would not be able to come to the phone.:mad:


This is not a new issue for them.

Eric Cartman

LineConsole wrote: »

Blaming your low wage unskilled staff on the failure of a new office is really poor form. One or two staff can be a weak link, but an entire office? Nah, the buck stops with the management here. This smacks of a CEO who is too timid to address the managers that failed here, (including herself) and is throwing the little guy under the bus.

I think its a case of 'pay peanuts, get monkeys' . The location wasn't the issue, but they opened the call centre there thinking they could get some country bumpkins for 22k a year to do the same job that they'd get 28-30k a year for up in Dublin. Sadly what they failed to realise is sligo isn't exactly rural Poland, if they'd advertised the jobs anywhere in the country for that pay they'd have gotten the same poor quality of staff.

But the worst thing you can do as a CEO is when you make a mistake, not even take the blame and realise where the actual failings were. "the people were harder to train" and saying it was a mistake is silly. I bet if they were paying 28k a year they would have gotten a much higher calibre of candidate coming through the door, especially since theres so many people working in Dublin call centres for that money who would love to ditch their dub apartment and weekly train journeys back to sligo.

dhaughton99

Some people just aren’t fit for work.

Wanderer78

dhaughton99 wrote: »

Some people just aren’t fit for work.

have you experienced the call center?

beauf

Where is the regulator in all this.

The standard customer service in this industry in Ireland has always been generally poor. Lately it seems to dropped far lower.
Some of these companies have great deals. But most people won't touch them due to these customer service issues.
How bad do you have to be to end up on national TV over it.

RandomViewer

The call centre is just a symptom of the overall basket case that is Eir, if they made any effort in servicing the network nobody would need to call them.
If there was ever a case for re- nationalisation of the Telecommunications network this is it,

beauf

dhaughton99 wrote: »

Some people just aren’t fit for work.

The systems they use should be robust enough that anyone can use them.

Also if the company has the same issues, everywhere it moves to, be that Dublin overseas, or some other location. The common factor is not the staff. Its the company.

DrumSteve

Aegir wrote: »

I worked for Meteor many moons ago and they were probably the most agile, well run and commercially astute company I have ever worked for. They had some great people who were excellent at sorting out problems and making sure the place ran well.

Then they were bought by Eircom, who were the absolute polar opposite. Idiots who were there because of time served rather than actually being good at their jobs, all with a civil service and strong trade union mentality.

They didn't really like it that Meteor was so forward looking and well run, so they set about dismantling everything Meteor had and absorbing it into the Eircom way of doing things. It was madness.

If Meteor had taken over Eircom, the company would be completely different today.

Was there myself in Meteor at the same time.

I remember some of the cost cutting Eir did when they took over. Absolute shambles of a company.

Richard Hillman

I didn't know they had a Sligo in India

RandomViewer

dhaughton99 wrote: »

Some people just aren’t fit for work.

These places pay very little and once someone sees any other opportunity they are gone, it's a shyte job with little prospects, saying that Eir were rubbish when their call centre was in India

ILoveYourVibes

robinbird wrote: »

The CEO of EIr Carolan Lennon

She is clearly a PR delight.

So not only does her company have ****ty customer service ..she has now offended sligo in general and probably most people there who have never even worked for her.

Clever woman i dont think.

DrumSteve

RandomViewer wrote: »

These places pay very little and once someone sees any other opportunity they are gone, it's a shyte job with little prospects, saying that Eir were rubbish when their call centre was in India

Their call centre was never in India.

Parts of it were run by an Indian Company out of Telephone House in Marlborough Street in Dublin.

mariaalice

Completely random thought whatever happened to all the telephone operators in Eircom can you still phone 10 or whatever it was and get an operator.

beggars_bush

did you hear about the lad who got a job with Eir so he could cancel his broadband contract?

Eric Cartman

mariaalice wrote: »

Completely random thought whatever happened to all the telephone operators in Eircom can you still phone 10 or whatever it was and get an operator.

id imagine theres 2 of them left, sitting in a room with HQ counting down the days till they're 55 and can be sent on their way with a fat defined benefit pension. Answering the same calls to the same 4 aul biddies.