ValueIreland.com

Back at the end of September, I wrote about my parents experience of French customer service on a recent trip to Paris.

As well as the response to the blog itself, there was some interesting reaction on a couple of French blogs as well.

The first, under the heading “we are not savages” is available here. The other, linked here, where the Value Ireland blog is used as a comment is entitled “I’m ashamed of us” and has some very strong words about the authors perception of French customer service, and is very similar in tone to my own perceptions of much of the customer service we have to put up with here in Ireland.

This story in todays Sunday Independent shows a positive side for one of our many (mostly useless) Irish regulators.

The story says that following a complaint from the newspaper, the energy regulator CER, has ordered the ESB to repay the money it stole from consumers via their overcharging scam for customers who have their bills estimated.

The story estimates that 100,000 consumers may have been impacted, with those overcharged by greater than €5 being repaid. Even assuming an average payment of say €7.50, this means the ESB taking a hit of €750,000. This is probably a low estimate given that one customer was refunded €800 last week.

This now means that nearly 1.5m Irish consumers have had nearly €113m stolen from them by Irish businesses since 2004.

Had the pleasure of dealing with an estate agent in the last couple of weeks - well, might have done had they actually shown an interest. I went to look at a nice house in Dublin 11, declared my strong interest and invited them to sell where I’m living at the moment.

The estate agent informed me that the seller was not all that rushed about moving, and would wait as long as it took to get the right offer. In fact, they went as far as to say that if they got the right offer, they’d be prepared to wait for me to sell my place in order for the deal to go through. At the time, I was told there was an offer of about €30k less than the asking price.

So, I go about the normal stuff - getting my place ready for photographing, sale and viewers, and getting loan approval to determine the size of the offer I could make.

Next thing, over the weekend, the house is gone sale agreed. Sign up in the garden, and the various websites updated.

But no phone call or communication from the estate agent. In hindsight, it’s obvious they received what probably appeared to be a final offer in the middle of last week because they refreshed the entries on daft.ie and myhome.ie to get the house back to the top of the search lists.

I can’t help thinking that this estate agent didn’t do the best they could in the interests of their client by not following up on all leads they had in the sale of this property, particularly in the current sales environment. And this is despite the promise on their website that they “are committed to getting the very best results for our clients”.

So, if you live in Dublin 11 and your house recently went sale agreed, be aware that your estate agent didn’t do everything they could to get the “best results” for you.

There’s a focus at the moment on saving energy in the office and at home, and I’ve blogged about this before here. Much of the push is coming from the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources website power of one.

The UK Motley Fool has today provided their own 10 Ways to Save Energy. There are some new ones there, and some old ones, but they’re always worth a reminder.

And unfortunately, given the lack of competition in the gas and electricity markets for residential consumers, point number 10 is of no use to us here in Ireland.

There’s a good article in todays Pricewatch from Conor Pope in the Irish Times - his blog version is here. Though, I’d disagree with his description of the charges he describes as “rip-offs” - all the charges Conor refers to are relatively clear and openly described prior to purchase.

We might not like the dual charges, the handling fees and surcharges, they are told to us prior to purchase, and technically we can decide whether or not to engage with the business provider or not.

Though, given the fact that most of the businesses who engage in such practices are copied by their competitive counterparts (Aer Lingus vs Ryanair) or there are no competitors (Ticketmaster), we don’t always have this choice as to whether or not we have to pay such fees and charges.

In my 3 Broadband post earlier this week, I mentioned my frequent issues with 3 Mobile in the past (here, here, and here).

It’s been nearly a year since I moved to Vodafone, yet this week the clowns in 3 Mobile decide to send me a bill.

A bill which tells me that I owe them nothing. What idiots!!!

For years now it’s been my belief that Irish businesses treat all their customers on a “once 0ff” basis. Customers are screwed for as much as possible on initial dealings with a businesses, and after that, the businesses don’t really care what happens.

As an example, a colleague of mine has had an interesting experience with BT Ireland in the past week. He was a broadband customer of theirs in his house for a number of years before moving and passing on the contract to his tenants. He then rented accommodation and because a customer again of their broadband package.

So, in the space of a few years, he had given BT Ireland two customers each of whom was paying at least €56 per month.

Then, in the last couple of weeks, he canceled his contract in rented accommodation, moved back to his original house, and asked BT Ireland to be reconnected to his original connection. The connection was already still live in the house, but he just wanted his name on the bills again.

BT Ireland ignored him for a few months, then discovered that the connection and was still live, and disconnected it.

They then claimed they had no request for reconnection, but that they would gladly reconnect him at a cost of €121. Even though new customers can get connected for €45 (or free if they’re moving from another broadband provider).

What a crazy way to treat someone who had been a loyal customer of the company for a number of years. Unfortunately, there was nothing that BT Ireland were doing wrong legally since he didn’t have a current contract - he was just a prospective customer - but they knew he was a previous customer.

So, there was no one to complain to. COMREG will not get involved in customer-provider contract issues as I’ve found out in the past, and we’ve already seen here how useless the NCA can be - a pre-written PFO saying that they’d “work with the company” rather than do anything isn’t going to get broadband connected.

The final outcome - my colleague has found an alternative supplier for his broadband and will be getting connected to them later this week. Lost custom for BT Ireland, and he’s telling anyone who’s in the market for broadband about how they’ve treated him.

Allied Irish Banks has refunded €266,000 to 3,773 customers and apologises for stealing money from them. The reason this time was that over the past 10 years they took Stamp Duty from customers who had AIB credit cards, but were living abroad. Though, in this situation, AIB probably didn’t benefit from this “mistake” since they would have been supposed to pass this money on to the Revenue Commissioners.

This now means that since November 2004, 1,375,973 Irish consumers have been overcharged by approximately €112m. This is the true scale of “Rip Off Ireland” yet where are the National Consumer Agency or the Financial Regulator when it comes to addressing this theft from Irish consumers?