SayNoTo1890.com

Thanks to the reader who submitted the geographical alternative for Aer Lingus Reservations - a number which we thought for some time there was no alternative number for.

• Aer Lingus Reservations 0818 365000 - Call 01 886 8888

Back in the early days of SayNoTo1890.com, I wrote this post where I’d noticed that some government quangos were not providing geographical alternatives for their consumer helplines, but that they did provide such alternatives for corporate helplines.

At the time, the two culprits were the National Consumer Agency and the Financial Regulator.

Following an e-mail from a reader this week who provided us with a geographical alternative for NERA (the National Employment Rights Authority), I noticed that their contacts page had the very same situation.

Information
NERA Information Service Lo-Call 1890 80 80 90*

So, normal employees and consumers are subjected to having to use this 1890 number, but corporates get to call a normal geographical phone number.

Corporate enquires
Telephone: +353 59 917 8800

Why is it that consumers are treated differently in this way, and put at a possible disadvantage - as even they recognise by using the *

• Note that the rates charged for the use of 1890 (LoCall) numbers may vary among different service providers.

Why not just provide another 059 number, as our reader found for us?

Jan Battles spoke with me on Friday evening last in her preparations for this interesting article in yesterdays Sunday Times. Obviously, as you’ll see, I unfortunately didn’t make it into the final draft.

My response to the long wait times suffered in their survey was somewhat similar to my post below where I provided some alternatives to actually calling customer service help lines.

One of my other suggestions was to set a time limit on how long to wait on line. Given that all the companies surveyed were non-essential service providers, there’s no need to wait on the phone for longer than 5 minutes, or 10 minutes if you really need your TV or internet connection sorted out. There’s definitely no need to be waiting for 1hr 13mins.

I also suggested that you should check the hours that the customer service line is open, in case it starts earlier or finishes later than you might expect. I use an Ulster Bank customer service number sometimes, and it’s open until 7pm and I find I always get straight through when I call between 6 and 7.

I was told that eFlow have recently reacted to their problems with long waiting times on their helpline by having someone answer your call immediately, taking your details and then promising to ring you back (within 48hrs). Keeps the wait time down, but doesn’t necessarily fix your problem as quickly as you’d like – especially when the call back comes more than 48hrs later.

Finally, I was told recently of a large Irish service provider who has a special procedure that kicks in whenever a journalist or “person of interest” calls in with a complaint about their service. This special procedure ensures that these peoples customer service problems are resolved within 24hrs. So, we know it’s possible to do it – if only all service providers could look after all of their customers in the same way.

There are a number of companies where we’ve been unsuccessful in getting geographical alternative phone numbers for their 1890, 1850 and mainly 0818 numbers.  A couple of these are Aer Lingus (0818 365000) and Sky TV Ireland (0818 719 852).

From what our readers have told us, they haven’t even been able to get alternative numbers by asking the actual customer service people concerned having called the 0818 number.

So, what can you do? Firstly, keep asking whenever you’re in contact with them. You may on some occasion get to talk to someone who may be able to help more than others. Then contact us with the numbers, and we’ll share with everyone else.

Alternatively, there are a couple of things that you could do which might save you the cost of the phone call - though they might not be as immediate in their impact. However, if you’re not in much of a hurry, these might be of help.

1. You could check the companies website to see if they provide detailed help sections, or Frequently Asked Question. These kinds of pages may be able to answer your questions for you.
2. Call from work. Depending on your own employers telephone usage policy, you could call from your work phone and let your employer take the hit, rather than yourself.
3. There are certain times when you shouldn’t call a customer service line - don’t call first thing, don’t call at lunchtime or in the early evening. These are the times you’ll most likely be stuck in a queue.
4. Does the company have a sales line on a different number - is it a normal number instead of an 1890, 1850 or 0818 number? Call that number, and then ask to be put through to customer service.

Do you have any other suggestions that might help here? Leave a comment or contact us at the contact details linked above.

We received this e-mail from one of our website users asking if we could find a geographical alternative for Sky. We don’t have one, but wonder does anyone else out there have one. Here’s the e-mail we received.

My query is I’m wondering if there is any other phone no. for us to ring Sky T.V besides the 0818 one that they advertise with. They do not give any other alternative. It would be great if you could get hold of another phone no. for the public and post it on your website. Thank you.

You can e-mail us at the contact details above, or post a comment here if you have an alternative for them.

Do you work for Sky? E-mail us in confidence - we won’t say where we got the number from.

We don’t use Sky TV here, but if anyone is speaking to them in the next few days, maybe ask them if they can provide you with the alternative, and then come let us know.

Following on from earlier posts, I e-mailed both the eFlow customer service contact address, and the info address on the NRA website in a further attempt to find the alternative number for 1890 50 10 50. The more I hear advertising and think about this, this number is likely to cost people a lot of money going forward as the barrier free tolling beds in.

I would be grateful if you could please provide me with an alternative number to the 1890 50 10 50 number that you provide on the eFlow website.

Though this is advertised as a LoCall number – whenever I call this number from my mobile phone, it actually costs me 35c per minute instead of the LoCall rate.

If you had a Dublin or other Irish number available, I could call this number by using my mobile package minutes and would therefore be able to avoid the excessive charges for 1890 numbers charged by the mobile companies.

Your assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

So far, after 3 e-mails, still no response. I know that the NRA read my e-mail - I received a “read receipt” - but they haven’t replied. I’ll keep you updated.

Last week, we asked if anyone knew of a geographical alternative for the eFlow number belowing to the NRA.

Following an e-mail from a reader, we should clarify that we do make efforts to find numbers first prior to making an appeal via the site.

In this situation, we did contact the company themselves, twice, but without success. The first call got absolutely nowhere - we don’t think the customer service agent even knew what we was talking about - they didn’t even know what the number was that we were calling on.

On the second occasion, we were told there was no geographical equivalent. What we were able to ascertain was that the call centre for eFlow is actually in Northern Ireland so a 1890 number might actually be cheaper rather than calling NI directly via a geographical alternative number – unless people have an “All Ireland” phone tariff.

We had an e-mail this evening from a reader who was wondering if there was a geographical alternative for the NRA company eFlow?

This company is also providing tags for the forthcoming barrier free tolling on the M50. Their contact number on their website is 1890 50 10 50, but there doesn’t appear to be a geographical alternative number anywhere on their site.

If you know of an 01 alternative (they’re based in Dublin), then please either post a comment here, or e-mail us throught the Contacts link so that we can share it with everyone.

A couple of weeks ago, a Canadian contractor was working in my office for a few days. Being over from Canada, away from his family, he obviously wanted to call home in the evenings from his hotel room.

On the advice of his manager in Canada, my colleague bought a ZapTel Absolute World Card which is supported in Ireland through SkyTel.

His first evening back in the hotel, he tried ringing the 1890 number on the card, but nothing happened. He checked the “dial 9″ and so on, tried again, but nothing. There was also a 1850 number on the card, but this too didn’t work.

He contacted the SkyTel support e-mail address on the card the following day and they provided a local 01 number. That next evening, he tried to call the 01 number as well, but with no joy.

Confused, he checked with us in work the following day to see if he was doing anything wrong. We tried the numbers from the office and all 3 of them worked perfectly. That evening, for one final time, he tried all the numbers again, but without success.

The only conclusion we can come to is that the hotel has blocked the numbers to prevent their clients from calling these numbers. Obviously, nothing strictly wrong with this, but it strikes me as extremely cheap and grabbing by the hotel. It’s not like they won’t make a few quid on the calls to the 1890 or 1850 numbers, but it’s hard to believe they’ll go to this lengths to screw a few quid more from their clients.

From the research that I’ve done over the past couple of weeks, it seems like it’s not possible to call 1890, 1850 and 0818 numbers from Skype.

At different times during the day, and using several different companies’ numbers, I got a couple of different responses to

Bank Of Ireland 1890 365 365 - Extension 33653 doesn’t answer. Your message cannot be delivered because that mailbox is full. Please dial another extension number. Goodbye.

Financial Regulator 1890 77 77 77 - Gets through to some random ladies home number after ringing out for a while.

Bord Gais 1850 632 632 - Comes back with “Invalid phone number”

NTL (Service) 1800 321 321 - Also comes back with “Invalid phone number”

So, if you have Skype and you need to call any of these 1890, 1850 or 0818 phone numbers, you will need to use the geographical alternatives provide here on www.SayNoTo1890.com.