SayNoTo1890.com

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.

Thanks to the NRA, we now have a geographical alternative local number for the eFlow Customer Service centre.

• eFlow Customer Service 1890 50 10 50 - Call 01 6602511 and select the eFlow call centre option

If you have a contract with any of the mobile or landline providers that provides you with bundles of minutes each month, you can now call this number instead of the 1890 number. These calls will then come from your minutes bundle rather than you being charged upwards of 35c per minute.

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.