I'm with Clubman on this. Making a stand like he's doing is the only way some of these organisations will ever improve their customer service. It is obvious that they are in the wrong and hats off to Clubman for fighting for his rights (or rather his mother's). If more people did this, the service levels in Ireland would improve dramatically. Walking away and saying it's only €60 or whatever is a sure recipe for continuing bad service.
Former Smart residential customer now cut off
- Thread starter ClubMan
- Start date
Still no joy, still waiting for a response from UTV regarding (a) if/when they will issue a refund/credit and (b) if/when they can effect the transfer of her line from eircom. I faxed them a copy of my mother's eircom bill last week for them to double check her eircom account number and/or UAN but not a peep since. The NCA contact who was involved seems to have disappeared and I think I'm on my own again in dealing with UTV. My initial positivity about the NCA is unfortunately dissipating. 
Ah ... I'm going to miss this thread ... but not just yet...
At last she is a UTV Clicksilver/Talk customer with her broadband working and her line rental transferred over (to be verified). UTV have also refunded the full €65.61 charged to date. All that remains on that front is to see if her new service agreement and 6 month contract period starts from scratch now (i.e. €9.99 p.m. for broadband for the first three months and €16.49 thereafter) and to get them to apply her SW Household Benefits line rental subsidy.
During her brief time back with eircom (December 2006 to now) she was not getting the SW subsidy and although told by eircom to pay the bill net of the subsidy until it came through (and she included a note to this effect with her payment) they still sent her an arrears/overdue notice when she did this. She tried sorting it out with them but once again met with a brick wall. Only Age Action Ireland once again were willing to try to sort this out and are trying to do so at the moment.
So - in this saga (so far) kudos to Age Action Ireland for being very proactive in assisting an OAP consumer in dealing with the various bureaucracies involved. Thanks to the NCA for putting me in contact with somebody in UTV who could actually do something about sorting the problem out even if subsequently NCA seemed to fall by the wayside in terms of mediating on the issue (I think the NCA person originally dealing with matters left or something and the new person wasn't really much help). Thanks to the guy in UTV who did deal with this issue on a daily/weekly basis and managed to sort things out eventually. No thanks to eircom who seem to do everything possible to make things difficult for customers.
At last she is a UTV Clicksilver/Talk customer with her broadband working and her line rental transferred over (to be verified). UTV have also refunded the full €65.61 charged to date. All that remains on that front is to see if her new service agreement and 6 month contract period starts from scratch now (i.e. €9.99 p.m. for broadband for the first three months and €16.49 thereafter) and to get them to apply her SW Household Benefits line rental subsidy.
During her brief time back with eircom (December 2006 to now) she was not getting the SW subsidy and although told by eircom to pay the bill net of the subsidy until it came through (and she included a note to this effect with her payment) they still sent her an arrears/overdue notice when she did this. She tried sorting it out with them but once again met with a brick wall. Only Age Action Ireland once again were willing to try to sort this out and are trying to do so at the moment.
So - in this saga (so far) kudos to Age Action Ireland for being very proactive in assisting an OAP consumer in dealing with the various bureaucracies involved. Thanks to the NCA for putting me in contact with somebody in UTV who could actually do something about sorting the problem out even if subsequently NCA seemed to fall by the wayside in terms of mediating on the issue (I think the NCA person originally dealing with matters left or something and the new person wasn't really much help). Thanks to the guy in UTV who did deal with this issue on a daily/weekly basis and managed to sort things out eventually. No thanks to eircom who seem to do everything possible to make things difficult for customers.
Glad to hear that your mother has finally managed to move to UTV for her landline and broadband. I decided to give up on my attempts to move to BT and to stay with eircom, not out of customer loyalty but simply because I had so much stress dealing with Comreg, Eircom, BT etc that I couldn't take any more hassle and I wasn't going to risk being disconnected again!
Apalling service from the lot of them, but definitely most of the blame for what happened to former smart residential customers has to lie with Eircom. No further comment from COMREG when I asked them to investigate this....
Apalling service from the lot of them, but definitely most of the blame for what happened to former smart residential customers has to lie with Eircom. No further comment from COMREG when I asked them to investigate this....
Hi, Has Smart Telecom suddenly reopened their service? My friend has smart in the dublin city-centre. And seeing as it's a really good 4Mbit package for a cheaper price than my 2Mbit imagine package, i was thinking of switching in 5 month time when my contract runs out.
Would it be worth it or does anyone think they might screw up again and i'll have to go through the whole "ClubMan's mother saga"? Because i really could do without that in my life and even reading about it happening to someone else pains my head enough...
Thanks!!
Would it be worth it or does anyone think they might screw up again and i'll have to go through the whole "ClubMan's mother saga"? Because i really could do without that in my life and even reading about it happening to someone else pains my head enough...
Thanks!!
They never closed it off other than for residential voice line only customers. Existing and new bundled voice and broadband users were not affected by their recent problems. Not all exchanges are Smart broadband enabled though so the voice and broadband bundle from them was not an option for everybody.
Anyway - I was just checking back to give an update on my mother's saga. As previously reported she is now with UTV for voice and broadband and they are crediting the charges to date to her account and have her on the original introductory offer BB tariff (3 months at €9.99 and then €14.99 thereafter).
We chased up her Household Benefits phone allowance with SW and it turns out that for some odd reason she was not getting this before August 2004 although she did get it with Smart before losing it again after being forced from them back to eircom. Particularly odd since she was always getting the HB ESB and TV license benefits. Anyway they have granted it again and will be paying it to UTV as soon as possible but she is also getting €790 paid directly to her in respect of outstanding backdated allowances! Nice one.
In the meantime eircom sent her a final notice threatening legal action for non payment of part of a bill even though she only deducted the equivalent of the SW payment on the advice of somebody in eircom in the first place. Attempts to contact them subsequently have been fruitless. Now that she is getting the SW allowance backdated she will just pay them in full and write them a letter of complaint about their handling of matters.
Other than that we're more or less done. I think...
I never did finish this off but in the end UTV were very helpful in (manually!) applying the various credits to which my mother was entitled in respect of charges "prepaid" and "restarting" her discount period for broadband. SW did sort out her Household Benefits line rental subsidy and (as mentioned earlier) backdated benefits were paid directly by cheque. In the meantime my mother has had no problems with here phone and broadband services. In short - we got there in the long run!
Once again I would definitely recommend to any senior citizens who have similar or other problems in dealing with companies/bureaucracies to contact Age Action Ireland for advice/assistance. They were extremely helpful and central to getting this whole thing sorted. On foot of this my mother took out membership of Age Action Ireland.