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Greyhound service that’s not so swift

Environment editor Frank McDonald has had a maddening experience in poor customer communication from waste management company Greyhound. “Since last April, when our previous green bin collection calendar expired, we’ve been trying to get a new one. After repeated requests to Greyhound, it finally arrived last Thursday – four months later. He details his many attempts to get the calendar: “I first tried downloading it from greenbin.ie. Every time I put our address in the search box, the response I got was ‘there was a problem finding your address’.

“I phoned their LoCall line (1890-342342), and was told it would be posted that afternoon. It didn’t arrive. I phoned back the following week, and was again told that it would be posted. No calendar arrived.”

He rang three or four more times and was repeatedly assured that it would be posted out to him. It didn’t arrive.

“I e-mailed customercare@greyhound.ie and got a computer-generated reply from someone in the company saying she was on annual leave. It referred me to a different person and I e-mailed her, but never got a reply.

“I spoke to someone else on the LoCall line, and said our bins were full to overflowing and asked for an emergency collection, which was arranged for later that week. I repeated my request for a calendar and was again promised that one would be sent out, but it never arrived.

“I sent another e-mail to customer care and got a reply six days later with a calendar attached, but it was for black and brown bins. When I pointed this out, he replied that he did not look after green bins and gave a number to call. I asked how was I to know that he didn’t deal with green bins and suggested that it should be possible for him to forward my query to the relevant department.”

After hearing nothing more from Greyhound, McDonald rang the number and asked when the next green bin collection was scheduled, only to be told it was that morning.

“I said we hadn’t put out the now-stuffed bins as we still didn’t have a collection calendar, and she promised it would be posted. She also said she would investigate the matter and ring back last Monday, but – Greyhound being Greyhound – she never got back to me.”

Paying insurance for a long gone mobile phone

In 2006, Noel Ballantyne bought a Motorola mobile phone from the Carphone Warehouse with 3 as his provider. He took out mobile phone insurance at a cost of €12.99 per month, with Lifeline, Carphone Warehouse’s insurer.

“Payments to both services were paid by direct debit,” he writes. “I changed to O2 in October 2008, and bought an iPhone and took out a new insurance policy for that.”

All was fine until last week when he discovered that he had, since 2008, also been paying the insurance for the Motorola phone he no longer had. The discovery came when he received a letter from Lifeline, stating that his direct debit for August was returned unpaid.

He says that most of his bills are paid by direct debit, “so the Lifeline payments were being paid unnoticed, with me thinking they were the current phone insurance payments. I then realised that for the past 33 months, I have paid €428.67 for a mobile phone policy I did not need”.

He phoned the company and explained the situation. It cancelled future direct debits. “I asked for a refund, and was told to contact O2 as it was supposed to inform either 3, the Carphone Warehouse or Lifeline that the policy was no longer needed.” O2 said that it had had this problem once or twice before, but there was nothing it could do, saying that the problem was Carphone Warehouse or Lifeline’s.

Simple technology flaw in bank transfers

Last week Eoin Dineen went to his local Bank of Ireland branch in Wilton in Cork because he wanted to pay his university tuition fees via bank transfer from his Bank of Ireland account to an account with AIB.

“When I inquired how to arrange this, I was informed that it was not possible to do a bank transfer between Bank of Ireland accounts and AIB accounts. I was advised to withdraw cash from my account and go to the nearest AIB branch in order to pay the fees.”

He was “a bit bemused” by the response. “I sought clarification from another teller that it was not possible to arrange a bank transfer between Bank of Ireland accounts and AIB ones. Once again, I was advised to take out the sum in cash – it was €4,704.60. Instead, I opted to pay a €2.40 charge for the bank to issue a bank draft.”

He says the €2.40 did not irk him but “what did was the fact that it was not possible to arrange, what I thought was, a relatively simple bank transfer from one Irish bank to another.”