Read one Irish entrepreneur's blog as she operates a business in Dublin
Little People Take On Meteor
May 26, 2004
You might want to read the previous entry "Brightspark 1 Meteor 0" to make sense of this one...
As soon as Customer Care girl realised that she had nothing to give me, she became vague and effusive. At other times she rang me while driving and got quite aggressive because I wouldn't accept free call credit. (I couldn't fly to Barcelona or the USA on free call credit now could I?)
Then in February a new manager of the business channel began work and got dumped with my ongoing customer complaint. He came across as nice and pleasant and wanting to resolve this issue on the phone. He told me he had a voucher to send me, along with some call credit to make up for my time spent chasing this up. He said he'd deliver the voucher himself! Wow, now that's what I call personal service. I said thank you, and I'd hold off on closing this matter until I had read the terms & conditions of the voucher.
The next day nothing had arrived and when I rang 'Good Cop' to find out where they had gotten to, he was adamant that he had personally delivered them himself. It turned out that he had - to the wrong address. Klutz.
Cut a long story short, I received the voucher and it was SO restrictive. Basically it entitled a 1 armed albanian resident in Donegal to travel - on certain dates - and nobody else. It was not acceptable.
Imagine my surprise when I telephoned 'Good Cop' to politely inform him that this was not really what I had in mind, and he turned into another nasty, mean, distant automaton from Meteor. It was like a bad scene out of 'Total Recall' or something - me, trying to break through, using as wide a variety of words as I could muster...only to be met with - the party line, robotic repitition of the words handed down from the legal department: "As far as we are concerned this matter is closed."
I was furious. They were trying to pawn me off with the meanest shittiest voucher worth €100 that could only be used on a package holiday, not including the UK, must be for a week, and had to be taken by May.
Now, I had contacted the Advertising Standards Association of Ireland about this matter at the start in the hope that they might be able to use their might to fight on behalf of the little consumer. All that body did was write a letter to Meteor which Meteor ignored. After persistent prodding from me, they wrote another letter to Meteor and this time the phone company responded to say that the matter had been dealt with.
The ASAI told me in March, that I should contact the Consumer Association, or maybe ComReg.
ARGH. Why do we have these groups of highly paid paper pushers who achieve NOTHING? Meteor blatantly ignored the ASAI and did not show it any respect.
So what would you do in this situation?
Not give up.
That's what I did.
I instructed my solicitor to send a letter to Meteor claiming what was rightfully mine. And you know what?
They responded. And they enclosed a voucher - the original voucher which I was entitled to since last August. The one they swore was impossible to locate in this country! It's amazing the power of a few words written on legal letterhead.
Victory for the Little People!
And on the same day as I received the voucher in the post, I also received a letter from the ASAI to tell me that they would discuss my matter in a meeting sometime soon. Ho hum. This is May. I wrote to them in January.
Make your own conclusions, but mine are that the ASAI is just another bunch of space wasters. Meteor is a mobile business that appears to be put together with bits of dirty plaster and double sided sticky tape. And my solicitor is the hottest, best, most progressive one in this city.
And I'm on my way to Barcelona real soon! Adios.
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"
Keeping Up
May 21, 2004
Back when I was planning this site, a couple of people told me I'd "never be able to write in the blog" as often as I should! Well it looks like - for May - they were right.
What have I been doing? Making calls, attending meetings, producing proposals and doing the work. Much as I love the buzz of calling someone and getting a meeting out of it....and how I find joy from emailing a thorough and well thought out proposal to a potential client, it pales in comparison to actually doing the work.
That's the fun part. That's where the crazy ideas get converted into reality and I love doing that. I have some interesting projects on at the moment - pay per click wise I'm continuing to bring results to the day spa and the office furniture store. They've now been joined by a pair of top photographers - lovely site to work on.
Websites that are in development include one for a financial company that has such a good philosophy that it will be a real pleasure to get that across right...and a beauty clinic where I personally love all of the products and services!
And of course there are lots of other bits and pieces that won't make it to 'blogdom' until they're a little more developed.
But - as the sun shines down on Dublin - and the Luas work here in Smithfield is at last completed - things are looking good!
Swedish Delegation
May 07, 2004
To any of the Swedish delegation who are reading this - nice to have met you all yesterday, and I wish you all the best for continued success in your businesses.
Yesterday Ian Jackson from Go2Web and myself attended a meeting at the offices of ISME where we met a delegation of business owners from the north of Sweden to talk about the internet. Ian was talking about design issues and I was there to talk about internet marketing issues.
It was interesting to know that even in super connected Sweden (highest broadband penetration in the world, highest internet penetration, highest educational penetration) - small businesses are facing the same issues and problems.
I hope everyone who attended found the meeting to be useful. I did.