Until two years ago, I was unaware there was such a thing as a “life administration” day. This was how I heard a radio presenter describe her day off; a clearing of the decks to sort out bills and make calls to utility companies. As such duties have become ever more irksome and time consuming, a single day will hardly suffice.
We are constantly told to shop around, switch providers, do our services homework and compare a multitude of plans. This is always made to sound empowering, but in a country where too many utility companies treat their customers with contempt and where, as recently reported in this newspaper, consumers pay on average 42 per cent more for basic goods and services than their EU counterparts, it can instead be eviscerating. And the much-used slogan “switching is easy” is often hollow indeed.
Many of the service providers communicate their bulging profits in language that is a red flag to the disgruntled consumer bull: “Another year of growth ... across our top and bottom lines ... our ninth consecutive quarter of growth, capping off another successful year ... we are proud to meet the increasing demand,” purred Oliver Loomes, the chief executive of Eir recently. Eir has repeatedly been near the top of the list of the most complained about companies in Ireland.
The robust profits stand alongside voluminous consumer testimony about what they consider ineptitude, arrogance and carelessness in dealings with that company which, like others, is implementing hefty price increases this month. The profits are also a reminder that it is such companies and not the State that should have been providing energy credits in recent years.
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Energy companies have communicated contradictory messages in recent months. Stephen Gallagher, managing director of SSE Airtricity, said in February that his company had done its utmost to “shield our customers from the full impact of volatile energy costs as long as we could”; it is “a difficult wholesale energy market ... increasing prices is always a last resort”.
But in March, Paul Stapleton, chief financial officer of the ESB, which owns Electric Ireland, said wholesale gas prices had been trending downwards, with month-ahead wholesale gas prices down about 20 per cent since the start of the year, and “that will be positive for customers and positive for retail prices over time”.
You will have plenty of time to consider those conflicting assertions while waiting on the phone to get straight answers from providers that constantly promote their “smart plans” but do not practise smart customer service.
Unfortunately, in 1966 a patent was granted to Alfred Levy for his “Telephone Hold Program System”, designed to play music “to pacify the originator of the call if the delay becomes unduly long”.
Sometimes, you will eventually find a person to speak to, highlighting another odious aspect of dealing with some “service providers” – their reliance on low-paid employees in call centres who face the brunt of consumer anger.
Irish novelist Kevin Power wrote about this in 2018 in the Dublin Review journal, recounting his experiences working part-time for 18 months in a Dublin call centre for a “major provider of TV and broadband”. He wrote it because he had “this huge burden of experience” that led to “impotence and despair ... psychosomatic stress disorder ... recurrent feelings of worthlessness”. While enduring these trials, he was making money for a company that, despite its claims to the contrary, “is neither interested, nor caring nor empathetic”.
As well as being told during training that the company championed “codes of positivity”, and facing a motivational poster declaring “Happy People Value Being Here”, Power and his colleagues were sharply reminded if they were “below target for the week”, and also had to deal with the impact on consumers of that company’s deceit and derision, with customers on the phone displaying “sullenness, aggression, condescension and hostility”.
That was partly because the customers were being spun webs of lies by a company that promoted the mantra that “there are no mistakes, only challenges or opportunities”, and contended that the employees’ requirement was “to make the customer feel that their needs have been met”, even when they patently had not been.
In 2023, consumer contacts to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) helpline increased by 20 per cent, with 39,172 consumers contacting them. Telecommunications was second on the list of sectors that prompted the most complaints, after vehicles and transport. And this in an Ireland that is supposedly marvellously connected and globalised. Queries and complaints to the CCPC increased sharply last year, with almost 45,000 people contacting its helplines.
Power and his co-workers were told by their overlords, in a crass piece of corporate propaganda, that the telecommunications company had a “cultural aspiration”. Their aspirations, however, do not usually extend in practice to prioritising customer welfare. You would need another day off just to recover from dealing with them.
