Closing of Talk To Eir Forum 29th March 2019

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.