Brightspark 1 Meteor 0
May 24, 2004
At last - a happy ending to a sad and tawdry tale featuring the heroine of the day - Brightspark - in battle against the mighty phone giants of . . . Meteor.
Anyone who considers Vodafone and eircom as the evil corporatists of the phone world and leaves out the little lads - Meteor - should reconsider their beliefs and think again. The following story, spanning many months, just goes to show that Meteor are in the same league as the rest when it comes to being a non customer service oriented, squeezing, lying, Irish phone company.
The sorry tale began last summer in the hot and hazy days of August. After careful consideration, I transferred my mobile account from Vodafone to Meteor. Now I have saved myself an average of €70 per month as a result of this, but I was also attracted by the 'free flights' offer. It helped to swing me from O2 to Meteor. That, and the fact that Meteor are the little lads of the industry, so I wrongly assumed, they'd be less likely to screw me.
The free flights offer was for 2 free flights to a choice of NY, Chicago, Boston, London, Paris, Brussels, Barcelona, Edinburgh and Amsterdam. The catch was that you had to spend a certain number of nights staying in pre-defined hotels, but that was OK from my point of view as you'd have to spend on hotel accommodation anyway.
Every time I rang the customer care line between August and December I asked for my free flight voucher to be sent out to me. I was on quite a lot because Meteor's voice mail system is dodgy and causes problems. All of these requests must have been logged because that is the process in most of these call centres.
By January, I was getting a bit annoyed. Note: the longer period of time it takes for an Irish consumer to get annoyed....this is because we put up with far more abuse than our US, European or even Australian brothers would contend with.
I wrote a letter to the Managing Director politely explaining what happened and asking for my vouchers. I heard nothing. So I telephoned the office and got put onto someone from Customer Relations, not the Call Centre mind you, but a real live suit-wearing thinking person. This person told me that actually "none of Meteor's business customers had received their vouchers". Why? Well Meteor had a manual process in place for the vouchers to be dispatched. The sales person had to remember to write a code on the customer record which then triggered the vouchers to be dispatched. The problem was 'someone' had forgotten to tell any of the sales people that they had to do this, so it simply wasn't done.
Meteor was running a national advertising campaign using a variety of media and wasn't fulfilling it.
I suggested how Meteor could turn this around into positive PR by writing/emailing to all its business customers and telling them about this failure and inviting them to apply for their vouchers.
"Good idea" agreed my Customer Care buddy. "But we don't have any of the vouchers left."
That meant that I wouldn't be getting a voucher didn't it?
Yes it did. And so began the metamorphosis of my Customer Care Buddy into an altogether unpleasant officious Meteor representative.
more on this in "Little People Take on Meteor"