THEY value your call, but not that much. Irish consumers are being kept on hold for up to an hour waiting to get through to customer-service agents, a Sunday Times survey of service providers has found.

Four out of 10 firms phoned last week had an average waiting time of more than 10 minutes, with one taking more than half an hour before a human answered.

When it was called NTL, the television cable company was nicknamed NTHell due to the difficulties customers had getting through to its call centre. Now called UPC, it seems nothing has changed. Last week a caller spent one hour and 13 minutes on hold before being put through to a UPC customer-service agent. Another attempt resulted in a 54-minute wait, with the muzak punctuated by a recorded male voice insisting that he “appreciated” that the caller was holding.

O2, the mobile phone provider, was the next slowest. The longest wait to get through to customer service was 23 minutes and 49 seconds while the quickest call connection took just under 14 minutes.

Smart Telecom, a broadband provider, was marginally quicker at getting to the phone. It averaged just over 14 minutes with the longest time on hold being just over 20 minutes. Digiweb, another broadband operator, took between nine and 12 minutes to pick up.

While UPC and O2 both have freephone numbers for their customer service departments, Smart Telecom and Digiweb both use a Lo-call 1890 number which costs about 5c per minute from a landline or 35c a minute from mobiles. The cost of the longest call to Smart Telecom — which took 20 minutes and six seconds just to reach a customer service representative — would be €7.35 from a mobile or €1.05 from a landline.

Dermott Jewell, chief executive of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, said the prolonged waiting times are “an insult” to the term “customer service”.

UPC said it has been working on improving its customer-service interactions since it merged Chorus and NTL at the beginning of the year and claims it has enhanced its phone system. The company promised to increase the number of agents working in its call centre by 20 in order to improve customer-service response times.

O2 apologised, saying the calls were longer than they should have been. The budget also prompted “a huge volume of calls” from customers looking for ways to reduce their costs, 77% more than normal. “The average call waiting time in O2 Customer Care is two minutes or under,” it said.

Smart Telecom said the waiting times on Friday were an exception. “We monitor call-waiting durations on a daily basis. The average waiting time is under three minutes,” it said.

The quickest companies were An Post, Vodafone and Irish Broadband, which all averaged around one minute before a caller could speak to a person at the other end of the line.

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