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.

There’s been lots of people coming to this site recently looking for the costs of calling various customer service 190* numbers. I wasn’t sure what they all meant, so I did some checking. Here is the listing for the companies to which these numbers are allocated.

The theory behind these numbers is that they’re free for the customers of the networks themselves. So, for me, 1909 is free when I call from my mobile. Unsurprisingly I suppose, there is no information on the O2 website on how much it might cost me to call 1901, 1906 or any of the other numbers above. A quick check of the Vodafone and Eircom websites reveals the same scenario - 1907 is free for Vodafone BillPay customers, and 1901 is free for Eircom customers, but no cost information on calling the other numbers.

You should be aware that in some situations, you actually won’t be able to call some of these numbers if you’re on a different network.

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.

We’ve updated the SayNoTo1890 Call Costs web page with the prices NTL / UPC / Chorus telephone customers are charged to call 1890, 0818 and 1850 numbers.

Click here to read more.

We’ve received a couple of e-mails recently about the numbers for Chorus/NTL changing. The older numbers are also on the Utilities link, but here apparently are the new numbers.

Chorus / NTL - UPC

• Customer Care: Freephone 1908 - or call 01 245 8000

• Our Aer Lingus number apparently no longer works. Anyone have an alternative that will work for their 0818 numbers?
• We have been provided with an updated number for Ryanair.
• Updated numbers have also been provided for Chorus/NTL/UPC
• We have been provided an alternative for the Driver Testing Centre section of the RSA
• SellItYourSelf.ie have provided us with their geographical number also