All It Takes Is A Good Beating

Once upon a time Telstra had a web page that gave you the details to contact a specific director with a problem…I don’t know if it still exists…if it does I’m guessing its so deeply buried on the web site that you’ll have to do an Indiana Jones to find it…I’m guessing they got rid of it.

So Peter had enough and decided that the nuclear option was the only thing left so he called the AE for one of the companies he consulted to and explained to him that if they couldn’t transfer a phone because of different internal Telstra billing systems that he would have to advise his clients and suggest they move to another carrier.

All of a sudden after a few phone calls things started to happen and magically the transfer could be executed.

So it now the base line was set - if you want to get something happening with Telstra all you have to do is threaten to take away a few hundred thousand dollars worth of business but if you can’t do that then you are well and truly and comprehensively screwed.

So finally, after three months and having to threaten to take away business a single mobile phone was transferred from one account to another and moved from one billing system to another.

What excellent customer service. The David Thodey promise is being delivered.

But here’s the kicker.

About two weeks ago a headhunter contacted Peter and asked him if he’d be interested in working at Telstra.

After Peter stopped laughing and picked himself up off the floor the headhunter told him it was for a project that Telstra was getting off the ground that was to look at workflows and processes and cross functional business units to address customer service shortfalls.

Peter was amazed, he’d been told about this by a couple of Telstra directors that he met with. The company has spent hundreds of thousands on consultants to put together a plan to address the issue - Peter told these guys that if they wanted to save the money all they had to do was get customers who think Telstra’s service blows goats into a room and find out why…really find out why rather than pay lip service and they’d know how to fix the problem.

The feedback from Telstra was that they wanted to use an internal guy, or had someone in mind for the role.

This initiative from Telstra is doomed to failure because institutionally they just don’t want to hear how fucked up they really are and Peter was the guy, he’s been dealing with them for over 15 years and knows warts and all what’s broken internally and more importantly he can bring the consumer prospective to the table.

Good luck Telstra its going to be another wasted effort and lots of shareholder dollars will go down the toilet.

I predict that there will be no change after all the hoopla.