Eir wins excellence in customer service award – ‘You’ve got to be kidding’

On Tuesday night, understandably delighted staff at eir took to social media to announce that the company had won a prize.

The honour in question was handed out by Public Sector Magazine, “Ireland’s leading source of news, products and services for middle and upper level management in Public and Civil Service”.

The full text of the tweet from the official eir account read “We’re delighted to have won the Excellence in Customer Services Management Award, awarded by @PublicSectorIRL 2021 Excellence in Business Awards, underlining eir’s ‘commitment to connecting and investing in Ireland’. #LetsMakePossible.”

While an award of almost any kind is something to be celebrated, the wider public did not, perhaps, react as the telecommunications company might have hoped when they made their big announcement.

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The problem, as people saw it, was because the honour contained a phrase which many people would not necessarily associate with eir, all things considered – “excellence in customer service”.

Over recent years, the level of customer care offered by eir has left something to be desired. It has featured many, many, many, many times on the pages of this newspaper, as disgruntled and broken reader after disgruntled and broken reader got in touch to outline the myriad ways they had been let down and given the run-around by the company.

Its senior management were even hauled before Oireachtas committees to explain why they were so bad at looking after their customers.

And why were they so bad? There were all manner of reasons - Covid, wages, training and more. The town of Sligo was even blamed for the company’s many inadequacies on one memorable occasion, a slur that had to be hastily withdrawn as the county threatened to descend on eir’s Dublin HQ wielding pitchforks – well, not really, but the people of Sligo were pretty annoyed.

But back to the award.

While eir was pleased to win a gong – and who amongst us wouldn’t be? – the not always mild mannered and temperate users of Twitter were not having it. And responses, dripping with incredulity and indignation in equal measure, came thick and fast. There were hundreds and hundreds of responses.

While eir had disabled the response function on the tweet – no doubt because it did not want to be inundated with congratulatory messages – Twitter users quickly identified a way to highlight their displeasure at the tweet and simply quoted it in a post of their own adding their thoughts.

That theme was echoed by Aidan Fitzmaurice “I wanted to call the customer care team to let them know the good news but I’ve been on hold for three hours now,” he said.

Ailbhe Bosca found a more novel way to express her astonishment. “Coddle has won the most popular dish in Cork for the fifth year running,” she said simply.

“Excellence in Customer Services? What a joke,” fumed John Finn, who added that it must have take “some chutzpah to award it to eir”.

“Seriously, Public Sector Ireland,” Rónán Ó Coisdealbha said. “April Fool’s Day is two months away!” (His wasn’t the only reference to April’s Fool’s Day with mentions of Waterford Whispers also cropping up.)

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Paul O’Brien, while Aidan Boyce expressed his thanks to people behind the awards ceremony for “giving us all a good laugh on a cold and grey morning”.

William Kellett was unlikely to have been laughing when he expressed his view. “The last time I had to deal with Eir customer service was when I had to cancel my grandad’s phone bill after he passed away,” he wrote. “‘I’m sorry but we will need to speak to the account holder there is nothing else we can do.’ Hold on I’ll get the shovel out and dig him up for you.”

“It’s the companies that came 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th in this category that I feel sorry for, they must feel useless,” said Rory McEvoy.

There were gifs expressing wide eyed surprise, one of a gurning Nigel Farage after finding out he’d won an award for boosting Anglo-European relations and some screenshots of this newspaper’s coverage of eir’s woes over recent years.

At the time of writing, around 18 hours after the happy news was shared by eir, there were more than 600 retweets of the posting carrying entirely negative responses, 44 likes and nine retweets without comment.

So relentless was the criticism that it was impossible not to have some sympathy for the obviously well-meaning person who decided to post the story in the first place. Finding some sympathy for the corporate entity for the attention it was getting was pretty impossible too.