Meteor phone customer sent around in circles
Rebecca Slattery has been with Meteor "pay as you go" for about 10 years, but her recent dealings with the company have made her "a very unhappy" customer. She decided to switch to bill-pay in July, "and it has been the biggest mistake I have ever made. From the very start I have had nothing but trouble," she writes.
First she tried to sign up to a plan online. It was advertised as offering 400 minutes, 400 texts and 1GB of data for €32. “I tried to get it online but it kept telling me I needed to go in-store to purchase it, so I did, and they told me I couldn’t get the offer because it was only online.”
She phoned customer service, and, after waiting 35 minutes, was told they couldn’t do anything for her. “So I had to go back in-store again and phone customer service from in there. I was in a store for 90 minutes before I was eventually told they would fix it,” she says.
So she got a Sony Xperia Z1, which she picked "because of its apparent durability. It decided not to turn on for me after about six weeks. I brought it into a store and there were two girls. One was quite helpful." The other one was not so helpful, she says. "She was one step away from a Little Britain 'computer says no' sketch. Long story short, my phone was sent away to Sony for three weeks."
She was not offered a new phone or even a temporary one while her phone was being fixed. “But I am still expected to pay the bill. I am just shocked at the appalling customer service. I am beyond annoyed at the whole situation.” It doesn’t end there. “I then receive my first bill and it’s €55. I haven’t gone over on calls or texts or my data, as I’ve been using my free wifi at home.”
We contacted the company on Slattery’s behalf. In a statement, the company apologised for the “miscommunication regarding this customer’s experience in signing up for a new contract.
Only phones purchased online can avail of our web discounts, but it had previously been decided that this discount would be applied as a gesture of goodwill. Due to a system error this discount was late in being applied, but this has now been rectified,” the statement read.
“Once a handset fault has been confirmed in-store within 28 days of purchase, we offer customers a replacement handset. When customers are outside this 28-day limit, as with this customer, we offer a repair service for phones that are less than 24 months old. We are happy to offer Slattery a replacement handset while her phone is being repaired.”
No insurance payout for unattended phone
A reader from Dublin contacted us over a dispute with her phone insurance provider. “I left my phone in my bag, hanging on the back of a chair when I was in a night club recently,” she writes. “I am very careful with my things:
I made sure to take the bag with me when I went to the bar, and I was near it and conscious of it all night. It is an expensive bag, so I am always keeping an eye on it.”
Towards the end of the night, she went to check her phone and was less than pleased to discover that, while the expensive bag was where she had left it, the slightly less expensive phone was missing. “I was upset, but I figured at least I had insurance so it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” she says. When she went to make the claim, she was unimpressed to have the claim rejected on the grounds that the phone was not on her at all times. “This seems crazy to me. What is the point of paying €14 a month in insurance if theft is not covered?”
Can they do this, she wonders. The bad news is that they can. Companies have a definition in their terms and conditions called “unattended”, which will see them refuse a claim if an article is not within arm’s reach or within sight. If, when you are outlining the circumstances in which an item was stolen you indicate that the bag was unattended, then the cover is void.
