Preparing for win-back visit

fatherdougalmag

Hello all,
The missus had an Eircom rep on the door today presumably attempting to win us back from UTV. Herself said I'd be home later and to either call if he's still in the area or ring me as he'd like to do business with me.

So I'm wondering if anyone has had one of these types around recently. Presumably they've got a standard script of tricks and dupes they pedal. I'm about to go through previous Eircom bills vs UTV bills and build up a profile of our telephone usage so I can apply them to any deals he wants to strike up.

Cheers

seamus

Are you business or residential? They can't really strike any deals with you. Be aware of their prices, before and after VAT, print them out if needs be. Eircom salesscum, sorry salespeople, are notorious for just plain lying to you. Don't sign anything. Don't let him presurre you into buying anything. Don't let him tell you anything without proof. If he says something ridiculous along the lines of UTV don't have as much capacity as us, ask him to produce evidence of this.

He will lie. Through his teeth.

Best to keep the ball in your court. For example, "You get my line qualified for DSL, and sign me up for I-stream, then you can come back to me, and I'll sign back to eircom." Lie to him.

spongebob

Under current rules he cannot come for 3 months after you switch over.....if you switched over since the 21/10/2003 then PM me about it.

M

fatherdougalmag

Here's what I've got so far. It's a table comparing Eircom, EsatBT and UTV's rates. If anyone sees that anything's amiss, let me know.

The min call charge/set up charge is in brackets. Prices are cost per minute.

From recent statement reviews I'm aware that we spend most of our money on Vodafone calls. Currently combatting that at the moment as I can expect the CPS to do all the work for me

Edit: I should say that the green indicates the cheapest rate for each call type whilst orange represents the most expensive

fatherdougalmag

Sorry about that Muck. You must have replied as I was replying.

Checking back, it looks like the switch actually occurred on 9th October 2003. Yep. After looking at the last Eircom bill, the last call they carried was on 7th October. So it looks like he's entitled to his little visit.

spongebob

More to the point it looks as if Eircom complied with the 3 month cooling off ruling by Comreg. Had they not it would be an interesting situation if you decided to make an issue of it.

Is there any way you could go out the back of the house 'lambing' in the mud when he comes to see you

and sign nothing !

M

seamus

Nicely done fatherdougal. If I used my landline for calls, I know the bulk of my calls would be weekends and evenings to O2 and Vodafone nos, where, surprise surprise they seem to be dearest :rolleyes:

Show that to him, and he won't exactly have much to dispute.

fatherdougalmag

Working on the most recent UTV bill. It's a bit time consuming. One day I must sit down and write me a nice app to do all the local, national, mobile, daytime, weekend, evening analysis.

Here's how December looks.

That was the most expensive bill with UTV (so far) so I'll do a typical Eircom one now and see they shape up.

Mr_Man

A simple test to see how much he wants your business is to get yourself a cattle prod, or similar device. Then ask the salesperson to bend over and ram it where the sun doesn't shine. Tell him this is the Eircom test, and your doing this to let him understand how customers feel.

If he can come up smiling then you'll sign up with Eircom again........


M.

fatherdougalmag

Darn.

Something more pressing has come up so I won't have the time to complete this.

However, looking at the simple bill totals it actually looks like things might be more expensive with UTV than they were with Eircom which is strange. Here's how the bills look:
Apr/May - Eircom - 82.93
Jun/Jul - Eircom - 58.31
Aug/Sep - Eircom - 79.26
October - UTV - 47.91
November - UTV - 47.54
December - UTV - 69.41

Certainly warrants further investigation. I know from a recent check up that I did that the majority of the UTV bills were spent on mobiles. EsatBT seem to be best for calls to mobiles but I'll need to see what sort of impact switching to them would have on landline calls.

You could nearly set up a business for doing this sort of stuff. Better yet, do what the Germans do with their Least Cost Routing things that will route the call over the cheapest network depending on type of call and time of day.

I'll let you know how I get on though.

fatherdougalmag

Well things weren't as urgent as I thought. What I've done is racked out all the numbers and applied the basic call charge as well as the call setup (in the case of UTV) and the min call charge (in case of EsatBT and Eircom). With UTV the calls came to €61.98, with EsatBT they came to €55.19 and with Eircom it would have been €62.96. So I was €1 better off vs Eircom but I must seriously consider shifting to Esat as I also have my BB with them too. Together with the switch to €40 p.m it looks like the sensible move to make.

Let's see him get out of that one

spongebob

Originally posted by fatherdougalmag
Darn.

Yes, €ircon dropped some of their charges to mobiles recently.

Better yet, do what the Germans do with their Least Cost Routing things that will route the call over the cheapest network depending on type of call and time of day.

Here is a manual version of Least cost routing. As there are so few carriers in Ireland you simply write a few of these codes down near de fone.

Say you normally use UTV but think Vartec are better for mobiles.

simply dial 136360871234567 (13636 is the Vartec code)

your next call will go thru UTV as before.

Say you normally use UTV but think Eircom are better for mobiles.

simply dial 136660871234567 (13666 is the Eircom code, no irony either )

your next call will go thru UTV as before.

etc

Thats all a LCR box actually does . It has a matrix of times dates and prices and the code for the cheapest carrier AT A GIVEN TIME

M


Vartec Call by Call Rates FYI ( I have no connection with Vartec let me add but you can use them without having an account, you must transmit caller ID , thats 142 before the carrier code 13nnn )

13636 to Irish Mobile Phones on ANY Irish Network
Weekday Daytime per Minute 22c
Weekday Evening per Minute 16c
Weekends per Minute 12c

Ripwave

Originally posted by Muck
I have no connection with Vartec let me add but you can use them without having an account, you must transmit caller ID , thats 142 before the carrier code 13nnn )

How does that work? If you don't have an account with them, how do they bill you?

spongebob

Intruiged.....I rang them and asked. Your alternative to full or partial CPS is to prepay an amount starting at €5 either by CC or in a Post Office. That gets you an account.

M

SimonMaher

Last time I had a very pleasant rep from Eircom around to my house to try to win back my business (after umpteen letters), I told the poor woman that I wouldnt come back to them if they offered me gold bars!

Anyway, they started calling around to the house a week or so ago. Good cop/bad cop this time. Bulky man and thin woman. They havent managed to catch me in yet, but have caught both my mum and sister. On each of the three occasions they have called this week, they have been given pretty short shrift but spent 10 minutes tonight trying to persuade my mum to persuade me that they were way cheaper than my current provider. Bastards.

When I signed up for UTV Radsl, I migrated from ISDN which the little man in Eircom told me would cost 24.99 (plus my 99 Euro to UTV). When my bill came in, it had an additional charge of 123 Euro + VAT. I rang them to get them to explain. Many phone calls later, their compromise suggested was "Well, Sir, why dont you just pay the 123 Euro and if we find we have made a mistake, you can have it back as a credit". Bastards. Didnt pay of course.

Most recent bill arrived this week:

Balance brought forward = 153.21
Recurring Charges = 37.18
Call Charges = 0.00
Miscellaneous Credit = - 86.78
Charges for this period = - 49.60

Vat on - 49.60 @ 21% = - 10.41
Total Bill = 93.20

Its like Seinfelds bizzaro-world. Rang them to ask them just to confirm what the -86.78 was for. Accounts department had no idea. Whats the vat on - 49.60 I asked? Silence from the other end of the line. Jaysus.

Moral of the story is dont let them feck you around or intimidate you, and on principal, tell them to piss off when they call to your door (nicely!).

Cheers,

Pete

PS My apologies for the extra long rant. Just annoys me to think that there are people innocently being taken in by Eircoms nonsense. Sorry again.

fatherdougalmag

Well no show last night. Just as well really. We had the world and it's mother in. I'm sure that if he's canvassing the area he'll try again. Left me his mobile number on the back of one of their glossies. Jaysus I'd love to know how much of our beloved line rental goes towards printing nice colour bills, glossy brochures and all that. I thought it was funny though that he left me an 087 number to ring when they're the most expensive for evening/weekend calls. Another irony is that he told the missus he used to work for EsatBT. Maybe it's just a pitch to try and sway us.

Anyway, I'm going to spend some more time with my monster spreadsheet and put the past few bills through the three operators to see how it works out but I strongly feel I'll go with EsatBT so I can get my broadband reduced as well.

Has anybody tried this sort of move yet (already have BB but want to migrate to Talk and Surf)? I hear that EsatBT's accounting isn't exactly confidence instilling and that people get billed twice and stuff.

TCP/IP

Seamus that is a fair comment and I accept that point I just want my point of view to be known on the subject it may not be what everybody else thinks but I think all opinions should be valid as i disagree with a lot of what other people say and I also agree with a lot that is said. That was the whole point of my post. I having nothing to do with Eircom but any dealings I have had have been perfect with no issues, with the latest been my DSL installation no problems there either.

seamus

Grand so. (I edited my last post while you were replying...it's all a mess)

Now....where were we? (i.e. back on topic please )

Ripwave

Originally posted by Muck
Intruiged.....I rang them and asked. Your alternative to full or partial CPS is to prepay an amount starting at €5 either by CC or in a Post Office. That gets you an account.

So you do have to have an account with them before you can use them?

This is another example of an anti-competetive practice by oreillycom. In the US, you can just dial the prefix, and your ordinary monthly phone bill will include sperate sections for each provider you have used. (This was straightforward in the US, as the local telcos couldn't offer long distance service themselves until relatively recently, so they always handled "3rd party billing" on behalf of whatever long distance company you selected. It was easy for them to cater for multiple long distance companies on a single bill, and there was no disincentive for them to do this, because they weren't competing for that business anyway).

In Ireland, the only way to get to this stage would be to force the seperation of the business handling the infrastructure (including the metering of calls and the billing) from the business selling the actual call service. The only way that this can be done legally, in all probablity, would be to impose restrictions on telecommunications licenses. And we all know how likely that is.

dahamsta

You can - or at least you could - do that with most other OLO's and service providers. Perhaps Vartec is the one requiring an account? I always got that impression from any bumph I've seen.

adam

Ripwave

Originally posted by dahamsta
You can - or at least you could - do that with most other OLO's and service providers.

How? Were you charged for these OLO calls on your oreillycom bill?

BendiBus

From the Vartec mailshot I have in front of me right now:

"There are no prepayments"

"The great thing abour 13636 is that it is available on your phone right now"

"How do I get started? All you have to do is tap in 13636....."

"How will I be charged for using 13636? You will receive a regular bill from Vartec detailing calls you have made using our code..."

I would guess Eircom has to supply an address to Vartec once a customer uses the service.

query

I think that your first call is routed to the Vartec call centre and you set up an account (direct debit/credit card etc).

By the way the regulator consulted on whether calls should be billed on the eircom bill - and there was no interest.

Ripwave

Originally posted by query
By the way the regulator consulted on whether calls should be billed on the eircom bill - and there was no interest.

I can understand that an OLO would prefer to set up an account with a customer rather than wait 6 months for oreillycom to forward their money on to them (for a "small administrative fee of €2/bill/month", no doubt). I don't suppose ComReg considered this from a customers point of view at any point? Having to pay 3 or 4 different bills, instead of 1 bill, is a disincentive to moving away from oreillycom. It's all part of the "inertial marketing" edgs that oreillycom has.

Ripwave

Originally posted by BendiBus
From the Vartec mailshot I have in front of me right now:

"There are no prepayments"

"The great thing abour 13636 is that it is available on your phone right now"

"How do I get started? All you have to do is tap in 13636....."

"How will I be charged for using 13636? You will receive a regular bill from Vartec detailing calls you have made using our code..."

I would guess Eircom has to supply an address to Vartec once a customer uses the service.

I'd be extremely surprised if it worked that way. I sincerely doubt that it would be cost effective for vartec to bill me for one or two calls a month if they had to send me a paper bill, and wait for me to send them a cheque, even assuming that there wouldn't be any privacy implications in eircom handing over my address in the first place.

morgana

Vartec:
I've been using them for a good while for international calls. It works even if you are not using eircom [sic] for calls, i.e. I am with UTV and no problems.

They DO send you a paper bill every month if you have made calls during that month using the prefix.

As far as I can remember, your first call is 'intercepted' by their call centre registereing you and thus eliciting your address etc.
Never any problem, bills are itemised and you have a couple of days to pay.
If you don't use them you don't get a bill. Simple.

Cheers

Ripwave

Originally posted by morgana
As far as I can remember, your first call is 'intercepted' by their call centre registereing you and thus eliciting your address etc.
Never any problem, bills are itemised and you have a couple of days to pay.
If you don't use them you don't get a bill. Simple.

Okay, so you do need a account to use them, but it's relatively painless to set up, it's just a hassle to actually pay it each month.

Lissavane

I've had some problems with Vartec. They're cheap certainly. I've found their online support friendly but helpless. Ive been charged 3 times on my credit card for one bill. Havent had the energy/motivation to challenge it yet - easier to cease using the account. Seems they had problems discerning Euro from Sterling paments a while ago. Maybe it's sorted out now but why take the chance?

Sarsfield

Just so as I'm clear on this, you've been charged 3 times for something and you haven't bothered getting it sorted out?

Jesus wept.

I also note this is your first post. Are you familiar with the saying "It's better to stay silent and have people think you're stupid, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"?

Eurorunner

Originally posted by Lissavane
I've had some problems with Vartec. They're cheap certainly. I've found their online support friendly but helpless. Ive been charged 3 times on my credit card for one bill. Havent had the energy/motivation to challenge it yet - easier to cease using the account.

Well, if you wont do it for yourself, then do it for the rest of us. If people tolerate this sort of thing (and lets face it, it happens every day), it just means that it will go on happening. This sort of thing has to be stamped out as a matter of principal - even if it costs you more than whatever the three bills were.


Stuff like this may seem petty Lissavane, but it will always be there - you wont forget it and regardless of what you say, it wont sit well with you.

The reason that it wont sit well with you is because you were ripped off and didnt even make an effort to sort it.

elsoldemayo

Looks like the newest Eircom ploy is to forget about winback reps and just take your business.
I finally took the plunge and ordered UTV's ClickSilver package last October/November having used their UTVip and UTVxl packages for over a year. My ClickSilver setup etc went fine... everything seemed good.
My Eircom bill arrived last week, total due included calls for the last 2 months and not just the line rental I'd expected. Checked my ClickSilver statements (I know I should really have checked them sooner, but..) and no call charges were taken for the November bill and when my December clickSilver statement was available there were still no calls.
Contacted UTV who asked had I spoken to Eircom, signed anything that would allow them take back my line. No I hadn't, no contact with Eircom at all for the last year. UTV have since contacted Eircom to have my phone service switched back to them, but it looks like Eircom took it upon themselves to hijack my phone service when i switched from UTVxl to ClickSilver.
Called Eircom billing and they have no idea what happened.

Anything like this hapened to anyone else?

jd

Originally posted by elsoldemayo
Contacted UTV who asked had I spoken to Eircom, signed anything that would allow them take back my line. No I hadn't, no contact with Eircom at all for the last year. UTV have since contacted Eircom to have my phone service switched back to them, but it looks like Eircom took it upon themselves to hijack my phone service when i switched from UTVxl to ClickSilver.
Called Eircom billing and they have no idea what happened.

Anything like this hapened to anyone else?

it looks like some systems failure-whether it is with eircom or utv-I don't know..

To be clear, with utvxl-if you sign up you move your telephony to utv?

if you sign up for clicksilver- (and you are curretly getting billed from eircom for your calls)- you get dsl, but your calls don't necessarily move to utv..?

I:dunno: -love to know the spec for provisioning by olos to eircom

elsoldemayo

Originally posted by jd
it looks like some systems failure-whether it is with eircom or utv-I don't know..

To be clear, with utvxl-if you sign up you move your telephony to utv?

if you sign up for clicksilver- (and you are curretly getting billed from eircom for your calls)- you get dsl, but your calls don't necessarily move to utv..?

I:dunno: -love to know the spec for provisioning by olos to eircom

Whichever package you get from UTV, UTVxl or ClickSilver, you must take UTV's telephony option aswell, SO it should really have been impossible for me to have my calls with Eircom, while using ClickSilver. Technically I was in breach of contract with UTV.
I didn't want to be either, I'm very happy to have my calls with UTV and never had any intention of changing this.

jd

Originally posted by elsoldemayo
Whichever package you get from UTV, UTVxl or ClickSilver, you must take UTV's telephony option aswell, SO it should really have been impossible for me to have my calls with Eircom, while using ClickSilver. Technically I was in breach of contract with UTV.
I didn't want to be either, I'm very happy to have my calls with UTV and never had any intention of changing this.

Fair enough..
my money is on a systems spec/implementation failure somewhere..fwiw

dahamsta

Originally posted by elsoldemayo
Whichever package you get from UTV, UTVxl or ClickSilver, you must take UTV's telephony option aswell, SO it should really have been impossible for me to have my calls with Eircom, while using ClickSilver. Technically I was in breach of contract with UTV.
I didn't want to be either, I'm very happy to have my calls with UTV and never had any intention of changing this.

Do us all a favour: Ring UTV again and ask them what happened. Tell them that you need a proper answer so you can run it by the people on the IrelandOffline forum - believe me, they'll know what you're talking about - and ask them for further advice. Then come back to us and tell us what they said.

adam

byte

Originally posted by seamus
Best to keep the ball in your court. For example, "You get my line qualified for DSL, and sign me up for I-stream, then you can come back to me, and I'll sign back to eircom." Lie to him.

LOL, that's what I told the Eircom rep that called to my door some months ago. Doubt if I'll see him for a long time, at least, not with a broadband offer. :rolleyes:

TomF

I wish one of the heavy-hitting computer programmers around here would write something that we could use with the phone. My phone uses UTV for its default provider, but I can refer to the sticker for the VarTec prefix which allows me to use that service which I'm also signed-up for, and if I try to call a number overseas that neither UTV nor VarTec will allow (e.g., a toll-free number in the U.S.A.) I can always go back to the company with the number-of-the-evil-one, who also sends me monthly demand for having a wire strung to my house. It gets devilishly complicated. It almost makes me wish for the days when my uncle would get out an egg-timer (a little hour glass) that he would set in motion as soon as my aunt got through to my mother on the phone. That way, the auntie knew how many turns of the glass she had gone through, and how much of each turn was left. Maybe a better way would have been to put a pile of coins next to the phone and take them away, one by one, as the minutes elapsed. What about the meters that some of the pay phones have where you can see your money evaporating from the initial total you put in? A taxi meter?

Lissavane

vartec

Sarsfield: I found your post smug and insulting - but hey, if that's how you get your kicks.....

Eurorunner: Thank you for constructive reply. I will certainly follow up on this matter and report back when I've got a resolution. Have got all relevant documents to hand. I'm somewhat surprised no-one else has had a problem with this Co.. Experience shows that these kind of administrative problems are rarely once-off. In my case they admitted, at the time, that they had difficulty processing euro currency payments from Irish credit cards (long after euro changeover). I simply got sick of lengthy phone calls to their help-desk/accounts people.

Eurorunner

@Lissavane: Thats the spirit:D

dahamsta

Originally posted by Lissavane
I simply got sick of lengthy phone calls to their help-desk/accounts people.

Which is often what they want. The trick is to make a nuisance of yourself without letting the calls drag out and without shouting. I don't mean to sound patronising, but I find it's best to treat it like a game, i.e. to have fun with it, see how hot you can get them under the collar without bothering yourself at all. If you can drive them completely nuts and find yourself laughing your ass off about it when you hang up the phone, you win. My favourite ploy is very simple circular logic:

But you said $this.
But we meant $that.
But you said $this.

They'll get bored of going around in circles before you because you're just playing a game and having a bit of fun, but they have to get to the next call or they'll lose their job. So they'll end up fixing your problem just to get rid of you.

Don't think of them as the enemy, think of them as light entertainment.

adam