Eir’s feeble branding reflects its service!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

You know that feeling of utter hopelessness you get when you’re on the phone to a service provider? Twice recently, when dealing with Eir, I thought I was losing my mind.

My home’s only 25 minutes from Galway City, yet in 21st century Ireland there’s no landline-based internet available here.

Instead I have to pay for satellite internet, separate satellite TV, a landline and a mobile. Our internet is so slow that for business I rely almost entirely on my phones, constantly irritated by Eir’s bombardment of cheap bundle offers that I can’t subscribe to, as they don’t provide broadband.

Fed up with forking out around €120 a month for my two phones, I called Eir to see if I could get a better deal and they offered me a landline and mobile bundle for €87. Hardly a startling discount, it required an 18 month contract with full cancellation fees.

As a customer since 1992, I felt offended by those contractual obligations, so I called back within the cooling-off period to cancel the deal.

The salesman told me there was (all of a sudden) no need for the contract at all; that he’d give me a €10 discount for six months and I could be sent a paper bill. He did such a great job that I ended up signing.

“Fair play to you mate!” I told him, enjoying the prospect of writing a positive colyoom about customer service. What a welcome change that’d make to the usual consumer columns that exist to criticise.

Then Eir went and spoilt it all.

A couple of weeks after the new deal, neither of my phones would dial out. Living where I do at first I thought it might be atmospheric pressure or the Little People, but eventually I dialed 1901 to be told that Eir had cut me off.

This was Am I Losing My Mind? #1.

Eir said they’d created a credit limit for me, which was then somehow exceeded, so they cut me off.

I wailed down the line about how difficult it is as a customer to pay a provider if nobody sends a bleedin’ bill, and how much did I owe anyway?

€281.39.

What?

€281.39.

No, you’ve got it wrong. It can’t be, even with you going on about overlaps covering new contract times and all that malarkey. The deal was €78 a month for the first six months, then up to €87, and you come up with €281.39, and a random credit limit, and then you cut me off without even sending me a bill?

To  read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.