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The CEO of telecommunications company Eir will “unreservedly apologize” on Wednesday for the customer relationship problems the company has faced, and will blame the impact of Covid-19 for driving many of the problems that have provoked widespread criticism of the company in recent times. weeks.
In her opening statement to the Oireachtas joint committee on transportation, Eir CEO Carolann Lennon will say that the company’s main challenge stemming from Covid has been “to provide quality care service to our customers.”
She will tell the committee that due to the pandemic, hundreds of customer service employees were moved to remote work, while an effective hiring and training freeze was implemented at a time when the company says it saw an increase in 30 percent in call volume.
Timeouts
“The result was longer than acceptable wait times for our customers and I unreservedly apologize for that,” Ms. Lennon is due to tell the committee in an opening statement. The pandemic’s problems were exacerbated, you will say, because two years ago Eir moved customer service jobs back home to a call center in Sligo, with smaller centers in Cork and Limerick.
The closure of Eir’s retail stores has also led to increased demand on phone lines, and inquiries that typically arise at such outlets are now inevitably directed to call centers. Photography: Maxwells
The fact that this entire workforce now works from home, he says, means they no longer have on-site support networks, “so we’ve seen an increase in wait times and a reduction in the average number of calls. handled to 30 “, which is down from 40 before the pandemic. Additionally, IT issues take longer to fix, causing delays.
“If an agent faces a systems problem today, we have to send their computer back to our IT team, which means that an issue that could have been resolved in a few minutes before Covid could now take a day.”
Telephone lines
You will also tell the committee that staff have found it challenging to work from home. “Working in a bedroom or kitchen table is not the job our staff signed up for and we lost 80 employees between March and July when we were unable to hire due to lockdown restrictions.”
The closure of Eir’s retail stores has also led to increased demand on phone lines, and inquiries that typically arise at such outlets are now inevitably directed to call centers. Ms. Lennon will tell the committee that the average waiting time for calls has been reduced to about 10 minutes, but says that “there are some variations in those times, depending on the service required.”
She will tell the committee that she “understands the frustrations of the members” as many constituents are communicating with them regarding Eir’s service. Questions about Eir’s customer service and support have recently been raised at meetings of the Fine Gael parliamentary party and in the Dáil.
Last week, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar and Communications Minister Eamon Ryan also recently met with the company to discuss consumer frustrations, which Mr. Varadkar says are “causing great frustration in people.”
The company will also update the committee on its participation in the National Broadband Plan (NBP), which it says it fully supports, and its fiber broadband offering.
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