Ms Carolan Lennon:

Of course we knew it was going to be difficult. When we first moved people home, we did not know if that was going to be for two, three or nine months. Initially, in April, our productivity levels were actually pretty good, people were relieved to be out of a contact centre environment and there was a novelty factor to working from home. However, as that progressed, a number of people said it was not for them, so they left. One could not hire safely and train safely during that time, so that gave us a gap. Over time we have also seen the number or calls people have been able to handle from their home in a day decrease, and that is in no way a criticism of them. I understand completely how difficult it must be for them; they do not have tech support, some of them do not have great connectivity where they are and we did not hire them to be working from their homes. To be fair to them, we hired them to be working from a contact centre. Of course, we also saw an increase in the number of calls. What are we doing about it? On hiring, once the restrictions were lifted we started hiring. We have hired 120 people. We are not done yet and we continue to hire. Six people start on our tech support team this week and we have more people starting on the care desk. We will continue to hire until we have enough people to manage that. That is what we are doing. It is much slower than it used to be. We hire in teams of five now because that is what we need to do to keep to the 2 m and all of that. We used to be able to have much bigger teams when we were recruiting in the past. That is the first point.

The second point is that we are working with the teams in their homes, we are trying to make things easier for them with the technical stuff, we are trying to keep them motivated and we are trying to encourage them. We are trying to put our arms around them and ensure they do not feel all on their own in dealing with customers who, obviously for good reasons, are not happy with Eir. They are at the front line of that. We are absolutely trying to increase that productivity but are doing it in a way that is very conscious of what our staff are putting up with.

The third point is trying to take calls away from the contact centres. We have briefed everyone in retail on care issues. All the retail systems have been updated to be able to deal with care queries. We have introduced hours in retail before 11 a.m. for vulnerable users to try to give people another outlet to ring, and not just the contact centre. Unfortunately, not just in our business but across lots of businesses, with the current restrictions retail footprint is down so we are not getting many people going into our stores at the moment. We have also put many of the key activities, like getting a refund and reporting a fault, online so customers can use an online form.