Pricewatch: Retaining old number proves too much for eir

Last July John Farrar signed up for a broadband and landline package with eir and specifically asked that his phone number be retained as he has elderly relatives in Australia and the UK. "I received an email outlining my contract with the inclusion of my phone number," he writes. "Broadband was obtained within 24 hours which was great but there was no phone. The technician said he had no knowledge of any instruction to connect a phone."

So poor John made 14 phone calls to eir but its automated service didn’t recognise his phone number. When he spoke to eir staff he was told that he didn’t order a landline; that his number had been allocated to someone else and could not be retrieved; and he was asked why he wanted his old number anyway as he didn’t appear to use it all that much.

Then he asked them to review the recording of his verbal order, they said they had to raise “a ticket” and he would have to wait 30 days and then ring them to re-apply. They refused to let him speak to a supervisor.

Complaint

When he tried to make a complaint he was instructed to email ccm@eir.ie. "I did this and received a reply asking to confirm my details which I did. After almost a week, I received a reply that the address supplied was slightly different from the billing address listed, even though my address has not changed for 22 years. I re-confirmed adding my eircode and received the same response. I contacted eir through Facebook and was told that the email address I had used to make the complaint was not in use and if I wanted to complain, I needed to go onto the eir website and click on complaints."

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He says that one of the parameters in the complaint section asks for a contact phone number. “As I didn’t have a landline I tried to enter my mobile number. However, the form does not allow the entry of a mobile prefix as there is a dropdown box with listed prefixes but not any for mobile phones. I left it blank but the form was returned indicating that a phone number was a required field.”

Cancellation charge

The next day he rang and cancelled his account and was informed that as he did not receive all the products he was not subject to an early cancellation charge. “I was told that technically I was still subject to a cooling off period. Happy days.”

He signed up with Sky and has “to say they were a breath of fresh air and everything was up and running within 48 hours. They said it would take two to three days to obtain my old number and offered us a choice of temporary numbers. After a further 24 hours I got an email to say that my original number was now live.”

He thought that was the end of it until last week when he got the following text. “We’re sorry to hear that you are cancelling your services with us. As you are still within your minimum contract term, you must pay an early service cancellation charge. We will charge you this fee after your services cease. For more information please call 1800 303451. From eir.”

So he tried calling the number and an automated message said the number was no longer in use and to ring 1901, which he did. Except now his account number was not recognised, so he could not be put through to anyone.

“I went back on Facebook messenger and got a reply telling me to ring another 1800 number, but of course I got a message to say the office was closed until Monday. I’m 54 and in all my time I have never experienced anything like it!”

Feedback

We contacted eir and a spokesman sent us the following statement: “In this particular case the customer’s order for a home phone was misplaced as voice-over-broadband rather than a dedicated phone line. As his old phone number was with another provider it would not have been recognised in our systems and they had not made it available to us to use by the time the customer called.

“The text message regarding cancellation charges was issued in error. We apologise for that and the message system has been reviewed and corrected. The customer called our care team last Monday 27th and we advised him of the error and that no charges were payable.

“We make every effort to ensure that customer queries are dealt with swiftly and the channels of communications are clear, and we apologise that was not the case in this instance.”