Pricewatch »

• Dell boys fail to deliver, again

  August 20, 2008 @ 2:53 pm | by Conor Pope

  More problems with Dell, this time from a listener to the Ray Darcy show. She bought a Dell laptop in February but about six weeks ago it started acting up. She had a next-business-day warranty which meant – or was supposed to mean – that a technician would be on site within 24 hours to fix it. She phoned Dell but an agent told her there was nothing he could do for her. She rang again to be told fixing the laptop would cost €400. She rang a third time and got through to someone who seemed helpful. He asked to take control of her laptop remotely to determine the problem. He then spent about 2 hours ‘fixing’ it and started looking through her personal photos and files. Two days later the lap top broke again and wouldn’t turn on. She rang the support line again and eventually Dell accepted she needed a technician.
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• ‘Buy your own cup of tea’

  July 11, 2008 @ 11:37 am | by Conor Pope

  . . . or should that be let them eat cake? Speaking on Morning Ireland this morning, Michael Antoinette O’Leary described as “bizarre” the idea that airlines would give delayed passengers the comfort of a cup of tea while they waited to find out what was going on with their flights. Apparently Ryanair passengers don’t deserve it because they only paid €40 for their tickets (not including taxes, charges, baggae fees and “handling charges”, presumeably). Leaving aside common decency and respect for your customers, what about the people who pay a couple of hundred euro for their tickets, Michael? Do they deserve a cup of tea?

• What the Dell is going on here?

  July 7, 2008 @ 5:26 pm | by Conor Pope

  A reader contacted us last week after experiencing some very poor customer service from Dell Computers. She gives training and development courses so needs a laptop and projector to do her job. In April she ordered a new Dell Vostro laptop and specified that she wanted Microsoft’s XP software, as opposed to Vista.

  “A laptop arrived within four days, but it had Vista on it,” she writes. She phoned the company and was told to try it out and see how she got on. She did and phoned again a couple of days later asking for a laptop with XP – as she had ordered. She received it within five days and was told Dell would organise collection of the unwanted computer the following week.
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• Hurray for LA

  June 5, 2008 @ 7:33 pm | by Conor Pope

  In a move which could give cable TV companies everywhere, pause for thought, even Ireland where they are exemplary when it comes to customer service (ha!), the city of Los Angeles is to sue Time Warner Cable for causing “major havoc and distress” to its customers. The lawsuit claims the company violated its franchise agreement with the city by having subscribers spend hours on hold with customer service representatives and allowing excessive repair work delays. “Hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles residents were ripped off,” the city’s Attorney General said in a statement. “Time Warner must be held accountable for its promises.”

• Addressing post office problems

  March 3, 2008 @ 11:19 am | by Conor Pope

  A reader from Dublin was shocked by the rudeness of An Post staff in a Dublin post office recently. She called in shortly after 8am with a view to filling in a form in order withdraw some money from a savings account she had. She joined a short queue at the appropriate desk and when she got to the top asked the woman behind the counter for the form which, she says, was given to her in a very brusque and offhand fashion.
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• Can we help you?

  February 11, 2008 @ 8:28 pm | by Conor Pope

  It costs approximately five times more to win a new customer than it does to keep an existing one happy, which makes some companies’ shoddy treatment of those they have fought so hard to get completely baffling.

  While many continue to treat their customers with disdain, some at least are starting to recognise the foolishness of such policies. Almost half the speakers at a mortgage conference in Dublin earlier this month talked about the importance of service.

  The conference heard over and over again that the current international credit squeeze and interest rate hikes had made it difficult for providers to compete on price, which put customer service centre stage as the single most important differentiator between the various institutions.

  This won’t have come as much of a surprise to Tony Brennan, the Irish director of the Institute of Customer Service (ICS). He tells Pricewatch that organisations who viewed the provision of an adequate customer service as purely a cost are the ones who do it badly. “Companies who treat customer service as an important differential are the ones who deliver excellent customer service and consequently generate more profit per employee. They have higher staff morale, a lower turnover – which significantly reduces training costs – and they have a greater number of customers acting as advocates on their behalf.”
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• Till you’re blue in the face

  February 3, 2008 @ 10:17 pm | by Conor Pope

  After reaching the top of a long lunchtime queue with her pasta salad, a woman asked for a fork. “Nah, we don’t have any,” mumbled the bored till operator. She asked if he was sure (it was a large supermarket, after all) and pointed out that, without a fork, the salad wasn’t much use to her, but he’d already moved on to serving the next customer – Pricewatch, as it happens.

  She briefly considered making a scene, or at the very least asking for her money back so she could spend it elsewhere, but, after a moment’s hesitation, decided against it and walked out into the rain, no doubt fuming at his uselessness and her inability to stand up to it.

  Bad customer service experiences, from petty incidents such as this one to considerably more frustrating and financially damaging ones, are what have prompted most Pricewatch readers to get in touch over recent years. And it’s hardly surprising there are such high levels of discontent. According to an EU-wide study of customer service conducted last year on behalf of the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), the Republic of Ireland was to be found languishing in the bottom quarter of the table when it came to providing adequate levels of service.
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• Not keen on Ikea

  April 29, 2007 @ 10:59 pm | by Conor Pope

  Sarah Sharkey from Dublin has had what can best be described as a nightmare experience after ordering furniture for her apartment from Ikea in Edinburgh last January.
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• And they want to fly transatlantic too!!!

  April 14, 2007 @ 10:15 am | by Conor Pope

  Ryanair is cheap and when everything goes right, the airline is hard to fault. When things go wrong however, you really, really don’t want to be relying on them to get you home as a story which appeared in The Irish Times earlier this week proves. Hundreds of passengers were left stranded in northern Spain after their plane was diverted to a different airport. The flight from Vitoria to Dublin was then cancelled due to heavy fog and their plane was diverted a couple of hundred kilometres west to Santander before returning home to Dublin passengerless. Bad weather can mess up flight schedules and is outside the control of airlines but the manner in which the passengers were subsequently treated by Ryanair staff is absolutely outrageous. And the very thought of using the airline to cross the Atlantic fills me with dread. No matter how cheap they claim they will be able to sell tickets for.

  From The Irish Times

  “Passenger Séamus Fingleton told The Irish Times they were offered flights from Girona yesterday evening, 36 hours after their scheduled departure and six hours’ by road, or Madrid this evening, 60 hours after their scheduled departure and four hours by road.

  Mr Fingleton said passengers were told they had to make their own way to these airports. “When I asked how to get to either, I was told that I could drive. There were no car hire companies open in Vitoria.”

  Passengers queued for four hours to get this information and were not provided with refreshments or assistance, he said.

  Ryanair apologised to passengers but said the safety of crew and passengers was its main priority. A spokesman said the flight was diverted due to unsafe weather conditions and passengers on the inbound flight were bussed from Santander to Vitoria.

  “It was not possible to bus passengers from Vitoria to Santander for the return flight. The aircraft was forced to return empty to Dublin because the crew would have exceeded their safe flying limits for the day had they waited for the Vitoria passengers. Flight FR 7153 was cancelled as a result.

  “All passengers were offered transfer via the next available flight from Vitoria or a transfer via an alternative Ryanair airport or a full refund. The majority of passengers returned home yesterday and today via Vitoria, Madrid, Biarritz, Reus and Girona airports.” Mr Fingleton said he got a taxi to Bilbao and flew to Barcelona, where he spent the night before flying with a different airline to Dublin, all at his own expense.”