Instruction to workers another PR disaster for telecoms company

The apparent cynicism was eye-catching. A paragraph in Eir’s customer service training manual, as quoted by the telecoms regulator in a court case yesterday, said the following:

“Under no circumstances are the complaints number or complaints webpage address to be provided to any customer. Any agent found to be doing this will be subject to a disciplinary under call avoidance.” Under no circumstances. None. Not if there’s a critical problem preventing a person from calling 999, resulting in them having to drive to A&E (an actual event outlined in the case).

Not if someone’s aged parent has lost service and needs to be checked on.

Not if there’s an accident. “Under no circumstances.”

Any Eir customer service person abiding by their conscience, revealing the customer complaints information, would be “subject to disciplinary” proceedings.

The judge in the case called this “disgraceful”. He said Eir should apologise to its staff.

It certainly puts a very different light on Eir CEO Oliver Loomes telling RTÉ’s radio show The Business on Saturday the following: “We used to get 600 complaints per month and we now only have 27 per month… Only 0.001pc of our customers have a complaint and go to ComReg.”

Eir has accepted the court judgment – which related to delaying customers with complaint identification numbers – but is saying that ComReg, and by extension the court judge, have got the all-important paragraph about its instructions to staff quite wrong.

“During today’s court session, ComReg made serious, unprecedented and incorrect allegations against Eir, accusing us of instructing our customer care team to not comply with regulatory obligations,” it said.

“We categorically reject these accusations. The claims by ComReg, based on documents they interpreted incorrectly, could have been easily clarified had they engaged with us directly in advance of the court hearing. The slides in question were taken out of context.

“They are part of training material for new customer service agents, outlining the steps they should take to escalate calls to Eir’s dedicated specialist complaint management team. The transfer of a call to the complaints team, rather than giving the Eir complaints phone number and asking them to make a call themselves, is a better experience for the customer.

“It is regrettable and deeply concerning that ComReg chose to introduce these incorrect claims without notice in the court.

“Eir is committed to the highest standards of compliance and integrity, and we take our legal responsibilities very seriously. At no point has Eir directed any team member to act contrary to legal or regulatory obligations.”

Eir isn’t appealing against the judgment: it accepts it didn’t adhere to complaints procedures with customers in a number of cases. But it is also saying that the instruction to staff was something different, albeit adjacent, to the prosecution itself. It’s saying that everyone has got the quotation from the training manual wrong (“out of context”) and that it could have been clarified with some advance notice.

For context, the judge’s full remarks about all of this were that “it is disgraceful to threaten employees with disciplinary action because they are carrying their duties out in compliance with Irish law.”

The judge also said that Eir’s staff deserved an apology for the instruction. But Eir is saying that it never intended this interpretation, that it was simply part of a larger guide to get customers transferred rather than having to hang up and call again from scratch.

One of the reasons this case will have caught the public imagination so vividly is because of the troubles we’ve had with customer service in utility firms.

This was particularly tough during the pandemic, with Eir singled out for criticism during that period.

Older customers were often the ones worst affected, left holding on phone lines for hours or not receiving any callbacks when promised.

Over the past 18 months, Eir appeared to have improved both its network and customer service performance, according to ComReg figures.

But it still falls down sometimes. It has admitted lapses in customer service in this District Court case and accepted a fine, even though it’s a tiny one, at €7,500. Last year’s fine for overcharging 76,000 customers was considerably worse, at €2.45m.

The disputed customer service training paragraph may come back to haunt the company in time.