The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government has visited Irish Water's customer call centre in Cork.

Minister Kelly said the establishment of the customer call centre was a vital part of standardising operations and service provision for Ireland’s first ever national water utility.

John Tierney, Managing Director of Irish Water said: "We are fully committed to ensuring customers have their questions and queries answered clearly and promptly by our customer care team.

"This has been an extremely busy period and we would like to thank customers for their patience and assure them that we are working to do what’s right to provide a national water system that meets the needs of all communities."

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The customer contact centre is outsourced to Abtran Ltd and commenced operations in July 2013. There have been 474,000 contacts between the call centre and Irish Water customers since the start of 2014. Today, the centre employs approximately 450 staff handling over 130,000 calls to date to the dedicated metering and operations call line (1890 278 278) and over 275,000 calls to date the dedicated application for allowances call line (1890 448 448). In October 2014 additional staff were put in place to ensure the high volume of customer calls were dealt with quickly.

The majority of calls to the call centre relate to the customer application campaign which started on 1st September 2014. The deadline for responding to the campaign and applying for allowances was recently extended to 30th November 2014. The application campaign is designed to offer customers the most convenient method to apply for water allowances and ensure their details are correct for billing purposes.

(CD/MH)