Esat Vs Eircom - "Battle of the Biddies" - customer service compared

Dustaz

Since i was bored in work today i indulged in a little diversion of "poll the telcos to see whats up". I used to do this every month, but since i got dsl, i only get round to doing it every 4 or 5 months.

Anyway, Eircon were first and dreadful as usual. After informing the saleswoman that i was an i-stream customer and was thinking of switching to Esats dsl, i enquired as to whether there would be any changes to I-streams billing/specs.

First i was told there was no difference between i-stream and Esats DSL (i was put on hold while she checked about Caps). I tried to educate her as to the lack of cap and the fact Esat has double the upstream bandwith, but it didnt seem to register.

Then i was told that there had NEVER been any complaints about i-streams pricing and that basically, that was the price so tough (in fairness, she didnt say this, but that was the tone). At this point i became a little pissed off and said she was lieing, as i know that I and many others have complained about the price. Also the fact that its all over the press as being a very high price and the minister has mentioned 'affordable' broadband.

She also told me that eircom owned every single line in the country and LLU did not affect that (more of this later). Anyway, it was pointless to continue as she didnt seem very interested in keeping me on the i-stream service.


Next up it was Esat.

I rang 2 sales numbers, both of which put me through to a answering machine (not a good start) but then i rang residential and the woman there not only put me through to a live human being, but promised to stay on the line to make sure it wasnt a voice mail box. Kudos from the start there.

The DSL salesperson i was put through to was an exceedingly pleasant woman, who even after hearing i wasnt on an esat exchange continued to thank me for interest and promised to keep me up to date. She said that esat had no firm plans to upgrade any more exhanges than the existing 40, but were going to look at the possibility next year. When i asked about price, she pointed out the upcoming residential offer - "within the next few weeks, probably not this side of xmas tho". She also said they were going to start fully unbundling the lines for voice and data.
She was genuinly helpful, pleasant and a credit to her company.

ok, thats all very interesting but there IS a point to all this

1. So , theres been no complaints about the price to eircom? I urge everyone who has a spare 5 minutes to call 1800 303 503 and just register a polite complaint about the price of i-stream. Use examples of other european countries if needs be, but register the complaint. It probably wont make any difference, but the call is free and youll fell better

2. Unbundling - After unbundling do eircom own the line anymore? The eircom biddy seemed to think that eircom own all the lines in the country no matter what happens. Im not sure but im interested to know.

Lastly, even without the obvious differences in the quality of product between Errorcom and Esat, the customer care would swing it here alone. Esat were genuinely interested in DSL customers, Eircon didnt seem to give a toss whether i was going to stay or go.

DC

I know a couple of people have posted up their stories about how they could not get in contact with anyone in Esat and they did not return calls etc. Please persist, ring until you don't get into their voice mail.

However, I can echo Dustaz's sentiment here. The Esat customer service people were very good to deal with.

Just before installation I received a call from someone who was arranging the installation time (left a message on my voice mail) and also from the account manager to let me know that everything was ready to go and that someone was trying to contact me.

Installation was smooth. I was provided with my IP address at the time of installation. Installation was neat running the extension cable upstairs.

The (not paid for) dsl modem/router appears to be a very good model which meant instant connection on my PC and laptop with no additional software required meaning maximum compatibility.

And technically everything has been superb in terms of latency, download speeds and up-time.

The only gripe I have? The price obviously. But at least the service itself is very good, which is the most important thing.

Eircom on the other hand? Everything I have heard about their service so far has been way below that of Esat.

Customer Service - laughable
Latency - a joke (no better than ISDN)
Equipment - inferior to Esat's Ericsson offering (and you have to pay for it!)
IP Address - It appears you have to chase them even for an IP address.
Cost - far worse than Esat's already expensive offering. A 3GB cap, half the upstream speed, etc, etc....
Lies - lies and more lies. Like "to connect a whole office you must go for our 1Mbit+ product which allows up to 4 other PCs to connect" or "To run DSL you must have a Pentium 3 machine running windoze with IE5 and god forbid if you have an AMD processor or IE6 or Windows XP or Linux or MacOS (or Amiga or Solaris.......). Or "to get ADSL you must have a brand new copper line within 1 mile of the exchange... and sure, 500,000 lines are already upgraded".

Its all been said before.

When Esat have the capability to take over the line completely, I expect I will gladly dump €ircon forever! Imagine never having dealings with €ircon ever again

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Dustaz
2. Unbundling - After unbundling do eircom own the line anymore? The eircom biddy seemed to think that eircom own all the lines in the country no matter what happens. Im not sure but im interested to know.

Eircom still own the line. The OLO merely rents it and is subject to strict conditions as to what the can and can't do with it.

Dustaz

One thing that i should point out , it did occur to me that that post smacked of 'pointless rant'. I should say that ive done this on many occasions before and managed to keep it to myself.

Its just that this time, i was completly bowled over by the difference in attidudes. Eircom really didnt seem to give 2 hoots as to wether i was going to switch to esat or not. From past experience, they usually make stuff up to imply that prices will come down etc, but they didnt bother this time.

Another thing i should say in the interests of fairness (and ive said it before) is that every time ive rung for DSL Support, the eircon staff have been amongst the best trained and friendliest support staff ive ever come across.

As Oscar said, I just thought id share the my experience.

zynaps

Originally posted by Dustaz
Its just that this time, i was completly bowled over by the difference in attidudes. Eircom really didnt seem to give 2 hoots as to wether i was going to switch to esat or not. From past experience, they usually make stuff up to imply that prices will come down etc, but they didnt bother this time.

Why would they do that?
Either they're entirely confident that esat is no threat to them competitively, or you just got a biddy who wasn't interested in running through the happy script for you...

I've also found the eircom dsl people very friendly and helpful, and had one guy agree flatly that the price was too much.

Maybe we should ring up at random times, tape the convo and try to get a recording of one of the eircom guys saying "yes, it's obviously too much for most residential customers to consider paying, but management don't really care unfortunately" and send it around
...Although that'd just get someone fired really. :P

zynaps

zynaps

Originally posted by jd
Bad customer service should be pinned on management, not the people on the other end of the phone.

You can't solely blame management when you get someone who is completely uninterested in helping you.
They're getting paid for their time, you're not...

I'm sure we've all had customer 'service' people on the phone who've made us wonder how they got the job.
Rang up eircom a while ago to ask about something, and when I got put through out of the queue, I heard some people laughing, so I said "errr... hello?".
Everyone went quiet, and after a few seconds they hung me up :P
So I called back, and you could tell it was the same person, who then dealt with me in as brusque a manner as possible

zynaps

The Clown Man

On the subject of €ircon staff I believe I can add another rant. Or clarification as I would call it:

I have found that in general, the sales staff and run-of-the-mill customer service (or the grunts as I call them) tend to be almost completely ignorant as to what happens around them. Now, there are some very good staff in the above departments (which I believe is manned by the same people) but unfortunately I have never come across one.

Having worked for some time in customer service I tend to have relatively high demands as far as service is concerned. Luckily, this doesn't make a bit of difference to my €ircon service summary because they have NEVER got anything right. I mean EVER. Some may think I am exagerating but I assure you, every time I have asked for something to be done, be it a change in voicemailbox or installation of ISDN or the repair of my line, something has gone wrong.

I was charged for 3 ISDN lines and 2 modems once for one installation of an ISDN line (without the modem). I had a line that I rewired MYSELF so that it would work 80% of the time for 2 years (8 visits from engineers did nothing because they checked the same thing every time and it worked until 5 minutes after they left). I was hung up on by some fool while walking in grafton street because:

"Are you driving? ... You are driving I know it ... Thats illegal now you know ... *beeeep*"

And these are only a few. There has been many. After the latter incident however, I turned on my heel and stormed up to the €ircon building on Stephens Green and refused to leave until I talked to someone over customer service. (I was in a particularly bad mood and got the idea from another w@nker that I could not get rid of in my own workplace. ) The guy that I got was extremely helpful, credited me back immediately my £500 odd for the ISDN lines, sent over an engineer to replace my wiring, and appologised profusely for the fool with the law degree.

Now that's just a snippet of my dissatisfaction with €ircon. In general though, I believe that the reason that the service is so dire in this particular department is due to €ircon's history. Most of the staff that are working in this department were working in the days of Telecom Eireann. And therefore hired by government under a tight budget.

"Pay peanuts; hire monkeys" comes immediately to mind. And there are certainly some monkeys in the sales dept. I do know for a fact that €ircon have had trouble getting rid of their monkeys, sorry, ex-civil servants. There are many still there that have been attending there for 20 years and are not going to start working now ... if you know what I mean.

Now that is just speculation, but it keeps me satisfied as to the reason behind their inherrant lack of service. I'll stress again however that this only applies to the grunts, sorry, telesales reps and front line cust ops. I don't deal with them any more. I'll only ring €ircon when I get a number that bypasses the front line and gets me through to the *ahem* educated *ahem* support. Take that as you will. (What a B@stard!)

1901 does provide me with idle amusement the odd time though.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Summary - for lazy/impatient feckers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Don't ring 1901. They are cappers. They know nothing.
Ring some other number in €ircom. They know stuff.

spongebob

Originally posted by pork99
but back on topic Eircom could learn a lot from UTVip in tech support & customer service - not that they ever will though

Most of the Eircom Leased Line and Dialup Internet staff (Eirtrade) were recruited in the past 10 years unlike the biddies who lurk in Eircom Retail and deal with what they still think are voice lines. Eircom Retail are the 1901 mob and deal with Billing, Analogue Provisioning and Faults. Yuck !

The Eirtrade mob are fine as regards customer support and attitude IMO, I have no real bad experiences with them bar some sh1te over a pager once ....but that was more amusing than anything else.

Dunno if ADSL sales is part of Eirtrade, I suspect it is an adjunct to Eircom Retail and that a few Biddies have been 'assigned' there.

Wheres that daithi54 fella when u need him

M

De Rebel

Originally posted by Shad0r
I'm not familiar with dealing with either company from a residential (i.e. dsl/ISDN) pov but I have dealt with both in regard to lease lines and larger capacity "corporate" connections.

In summary neither were great. Eircom gave us reliability issues and too much down time. They were however excellant with regards to their customer service altho I believe it was due to the one person in that department being excellent at her job rather than any planned Customer Services effort.

Esat _never_ answered their phones. Full stop. They were impossible to deal with.

Have to say I've had the same experiences with Corporate support. Eircom can be very very good, but its all down to the individual you are dealing with. ESAT have never once left me with a good feeling. Most of the time they are truly dreadful.

Originally posted by Muck
Dunno if ADSL sales is part of Eirtrade, I suspect it is an adjunct to Eircom Retail and that a few Biddies have been 'assigned' there.

In many was I find Eircom retail sales/support to be similar to their Corporate support - entirly hit and miss, and more often miss than hit. And this goes for DSL also. I'm at the stage where 30 seconds into the conversation ther's a decision branch
- going nowhere: hang up and ring again in 5 mins
- getting somewhere - keep going

Thing that amazes me is that all pervasive "couldn't give a sh1t" attitude that Dustaz referred to, especially given that the drones owned 30% of the outfit.

spongebob

Every ESAT and Eircom employee has a DDI to their own desk / voicemail.

Collect them as you go along and guard them closely, very very closely as it happens because these are useful people who do useful things and are not to have their time wasted.

Biddies have loads of time to ask stupid questions and then deliberately misunderstand the answer.

Wallop them with heavy sounding jargon and they get out of the loop fairly fast in my experience. 3 days later Biddy rings up about her ticket thats still open.

'Ya can close that Biddy so ya can, thanx.'

M

jd

Did you ring eircomnet or eircom?
Is the technicin from Lancomm, Eircomnet, or Eircom Ireland?

pork99

It looks like the Govt has finally laid the boot in to the telcos and it was definitely refreshing to get excellent service from the rat for once.

I think you are a bit premature

when we see 512k ADSL for 25 - 30 euro per month from a choice of 5 or 6 different providers and when entry level internet access is flat rate for 15 - 20 euro per month then we will know that has happened

highlight

With unbundling, the other company rents the line but can do whatever they want with it, effectively it is reconfigured to become part of their network

seamus

Originally posted by Muck
The Eirtrade mob are fine as regards customer support and attitude IMO, I have no real bad experiences with them bar some sh1te over a pager once ....but that was more amusing than anything else.

Heh, sounds like my crew.........If you ring eirtrade corporate support after hours you may be lucky enough to speak to me, but you may also be unlucky enough to speak to someone who's never taken an eircom.net call before (long story)

Bard

Originally posted by zynaps
Maybe we should ring up at random times, tape the convo and try to get a recording of one of the eircom guys saying "yes, it's obviously too much for most residential customers to consider paying, but management don't really care unfortunately" and send it around
...Although that'd just get someone fired really. :P

Actually it'd probably land you in court.

It's illegal in this country to tape a telephone conversation, unless you make the other participant in the conversation fully aware in advance that you are going to do so.