Sir, – Full sympathy with Peter McIlwaine (Letters, May 3rd). The latest in call-line crocodile tears is the departing financial institution which tells customers (automatically, of course) that it is experiencing a high volume of calls "in these difficult times", conflating the predictable results of its decision to close its business with Covid, Ukraine and any other current disaster. The art of apology is dead and gone! – Yours, etc,
MÁIRÍDE WOODS,
Sutton,
Dublin 13.
Sir, – Gemma McCrohan and Peter McIlwaine (Letters, April 30th and May 3rd) are by no means exceptional in their experienced of the new customer "service" currently offered to telephone callers by many organisations and especially by banks. It was once possible to call a branch of AIB and speak to someone within minutes but that was far too simple a procedure. So a call to a branch number now results in an appalling delay (45 minutes is good going!) and every few seconds a voice promises that "someone will be with you shortly" before those with the necessary stamina and patience are eventually answered by a centralised "service". But the madness doesn't stop there. The centralised service can't connect calls to branches. It merely takes messages and relays them to the branch with a request that the branch calls the initiating victim. Some branch staff have been kind enough to give customers their personal mobile numbers to avoid the misery of the official "system"!
AIB is apologetic for the delay in answering but sees the solution as recruiting more personnel to populate the centralised service which will involve delay as they will require “training”. Simply returning to the situation in which the branch answers its own calls is not under contemplation and one wonders how much bonus was paid to the genius who devised this effective customer deflection procedure! – Yours, etc,
PETER COOGAN,
Celbridge,
Co Kildare.