Park West people smarting at service

SOUNDING OFF: Ripped off? Stunned by good value? Write, text or blog your experience to us

Earlier this year we carried an item about the residents of an apartment complex in west Dublin who voiced their concerns about bad reception and poor customer service from their provider, Smart Telecom. When we contacted Smart on the residents' behalf, the company acknowledged "that technical difficulties in the past have caused frustration for residents", but said it believed the technical issue was now resolved "and that the new upgraded service is providing an excellent service".

A resident of the complex, Sarah Walsh would beg to differ. She has had Smart Telecom in her apartment since October 2005. "About two days after it was installed, I started having serious problems," she writes. "Smart Telecom have had engineers, senior engineers and their top IT people through the apartment to fix the continual problems that I have with my service."

She says that every week she has had different problems - "they send an engineer out to my apartment to stand and scratch their heads as to why my TVs are down or my broadband. I have spoken with everyone possible within Smart to try and get my problems fixed, each and every one of them listen and sympathise and promise, but do nothing. Phone calls and e-mails are never returned," she writes.

She has "to hope and pray that my TVs work and that they won't be blurred, blocked or have no sound and no picture". She was upgraded to the new Smart system last December and was promised that this would sort her problems. "The following day my whole system, TVs and broadband, went down from a Friday afternoon until Smart saw fit to fix it for me the following Tuesday evening after multiple phone calls. Since the new upgrade my service has got worse." She says she has been complaining for 30 months about the bad service and "can't cope with it any more". She is looking for a full cash refund from the company and says she has been "insulted" by the offer of a €600 credit on her account and a full refund, which, again, would come in the form of a credit on her account. "I have told them that as a consumer who has not received a service that I have paid for I am entitled to a full cash refund. They have told me that I am not getting a cash refund under any circumstances. I am at my wits' end and don't know what to do . . . I have told them that I am going to seek legal advice but they continue to ignore me."

We contacted Smart Telecom last week to find out what was going on but unfortunately were not able to make any real progress on our reader's concerns. While a statement released to Pricewatch on Friday morning acknowledged that "technical difficulties in Park West have caused frustration for individual residents" it failed to address any of the specifics of her problems and was, in fact, very similar to the statement we received from the company over two months ago when we highlighted a number of other residents' problems with the service.

Smart Telecom said its new management team had been "working tirelessly" to improve technical support and customer service procedures following a refinancing agreement in June 2007, when it pinpointed Park West Pointe as a "priority legacy issue to be resolved. The company undertook a large investment to rebuild the core infrastructure in Park West and upgrade the 333 customers at this development. This investment and upgrade included a change in equipment supplier and recabling." The statement concluded by saying the company was "committed to ensuring Smart Telecom customers receive competitive products with a quality service".

Razor-sharp savings

A reader from Galway contacted us last week after buying 80 "genuine Mach 3 razor blades" on eBay. "Even including the exorbitant $30 shipping fee from the US, the razors worked out to be a third of the cost of purchasing 80 Mach 3 blades at Tesco. The online price for 80 was €65.05, while Tesco charges €19.49 for only eight which means 80 from Tesco would cost €194.90. What an utter rip-off."

"My new policy," he writes, "is to buy only food and petrol in Ireland and import all other things. It may seem rash but as an American with a good sense of value, I can no longer stomach paying ridiculous prices here for even the basics of life. I have even resorted to buying such things as my contact lens fluids from the UK."