Monday, August 6, 2012

Telstra spells service - S-C-R-E-W! Y-O-U!

Finally back in the world after dealing with one of those too big to be killed but everything that can go wrong did projects.

I spent the last week catching up with friends and one of them told me this story which is just the greatest example of why David Thodey is flogging a beached whale in his search for customer service.

I’ll call my friend Peter. Now - back in January 2010 he discovered that his bigpond.com email address, that he had since the days when 14.4k modems were blindingly fast connect speeds, stopped working. After a whole bunch of phone calls he found that Telstra had migrated the account from an ‘old’ billing system to a ‘new’ billing system and everything broke. They got it fixed, but then the next month - same problem and again many phone calls, hours on hold with call centres and finally got it all back online again. Next month, same problem and same process - by this point in time he was getting pretty pissed off with the whole process.

He also discovered that somewhere in the tinkering that Telstra did his ability to access his online billing stopped working. A few phone calls to get that sorted and still no luck. So he just stopped paying the bill - that way when Telstra rang up to threaten him with disconnection he could tell them the whole sorry saga and get the notes associated with the account history and then pay them. This also went on for a few months until finally he got onto someone in Telsra who showed some initiative and wanted to proactively fix the problem for the customer.

Now I’m guessing that they got their ass fired because they were too customer focused and wouldn’t fit in with the Telstra culture of approaching the customer with a jar of Vaseline and charging them for the table to bend over.

So they called around, spoke to people and finally told him I’ve found a group that can fix your problem. They did, but, to fix it they had to change his user name for the billing system. Now he’d spent time setting everything up so he could login with the one user name for everything he did with Telstra and some ‘customer service’ fool told him that Telstra’s systems could not support what he wanted and so he could either accept what they were telling him or go away.

So given such a wide range of customer focused options he accepted it and trundled along.

Unhappy but, like most of us resigned to the fact that even this piss poor outcome was pretty good for Telstra.

In the next entry I’ll continue along with this story and you’ll be amazed at how comprehensively Telstra can screw things up and then blame the customer for the problem.

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