Friday 28 August 2009

When Telstra upsets a journalist......


The Daily Examiner, 24 August 2009
Click on image to enlarge

Not only in print but online goes the complaint when Telstra can't get its billing right and then charges for the bungle:

But the really galling part of this is that Telstra, having had us jump through hoops, is going to bill us for the privilege of paying our bill. It is sick.
I believe this move started months ago when Telstra sent me a beautifully crafted letter saying how kind it was of them to change their billing period from three months to one. We were quite happy with the three monthly billing and had no choice about the change.
So now we are being billed monthly and being charged $2 a shot to pay the bill over the counter or a percentage of the bill if we pay electronically.
Someone said to me over the weekend it was like a shop advertising an item for $100 but when you went to pay for it you had to fork out an extra $2 for the privilege.
Maybe if enough people complain about this unfair imposition the giant might be forced to change.

In the national media Telstra fares slightly better as it is reported that Telstra post-Truijillo is a much more customer friendly place and, elsewhere that complaints have leveled off (rather confusingly citing that in 2007-08 Telstra received 19,364 customer complaints).

One has to suspect that hard-pressed metropolitan journalists haven't gone much further than the media releases.

According to the Telecommuncations Industry Ombudman's own report, between January and June this year Telstra recorded a total of 62,541 complaints (37.3% of all telco complaints issues), with some recorded along these lines:

You will see in the pages of notes I’ve taken over 4 months that I have made hundreds of calls and spoken to approximately 70 customer service representatives. On one occasion, I was
on the phone to different departments from 9.30am until after 5pm. But to this day we still do not have the landline service that is so paramount, given our child’s situation. I have received conflicting information from Telstra’s representatives. Conversations have ranged from, ‘That staff member is not trained appropriately…’ ‘They shouldn’t have told you that…’ ‘Why
did they do that?’ to comments such as, ‘Don’t panic, there is no reason why we can’t connect you today.’ At one stage I was on a conference call with two Telstra staff from two different
departments, both disagreeing about the information they were giving me.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's January-June 2009 public report on Australian telecommunications companies here.

It appears that Telstra is not the only telco which still has a long way to go in balancing service delivery and customer satisfaction.

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