Ohh, with what disdain Australian telcos treat their customers.
My wife and I were Telstra customers for over 30 years. We were early adopters of mobile phones and, with increasing faults on our landline whenever it rained, we gladly gave up our wall phone as smartphones came to the fore and the march of GSM through the G’s occurred. We also signed up for the internet service when the Telstra cable came down our street, and we enjoyed 15 years of fast and reliable service.
But then the NBN reared its head. The first time I was told I had to go back to copper wires, I explained the problems we’d had with rainwater in the cable conduits and we were allowed to keep the cable service for a few more months.
I was overseas when they finally suspended the service, which caused me great difficulty in communicating with my wife. When I got back I tried to sign up for the Wireless Home Internet package but was told, despite the wireless internet being available in our area, that the Home Internet package was not. I wasted many hours, even appealing to the CEO’s office, but to no avail. We moved to TPG.
Everything went swimmingly for six months, we enjoyed fast wireless internet and good mobile services. Then the wireless internet slowed down and became unstable. Another two weeks of my life was wasted trying to get to the bottom of it. I was told that Vodafone had made a change to the cell we were connected to. My incredulity that a service provider would treat a business partner in such a way was met with “There’s nothing we can do.” So we moved to Optus.
We enjoyed our time with Optus. For nearly three years we had reliable service, and, although I was envious of Telstra customers as we traversed the Nullabor on one of our camping holidays, we had good coverage.
Then, two weeks ago, our mobile service stopped. We still had a good signal and mobile data still worked fine, but we couldn’t call out and no-one could call us – when we were home. If we were out at the shops, or at church, or at the pickleball courts, our phones worked perfectly. Many hours were spent with customer service representatives, trying to get the message across that the Burleigh Heads cell was defective. But I was still required to reboot my phone, do an Android upgrade and do a network reset (losing my WiFi settings). I implored the various customer service representatives to let me know when the problem was going to be fixed or I would move to another supplier. But it was to no avail. I went through three case numbers, they kept closing my cases, no doubt to improve their response statistics. I finally went to an Optus Store only to be told by a ‘customer service’ reresentative that they were doing a ‘software update’ to the cell close to where we lived and it would be fixed in 10 days time. I challenged the representative suggesting that he really didn’t believe that. I’m sure, regardless of Optus’ fear of software upgrades after the disaster a couple of years ago, a software upgrade would be done in at most a couple of hours, and in the middle of the night so as to not inconvenience customers.
So, we’re now with Vodaphone.
I really does beggar belief that companies who get their revenue from customers would treat them so poorly. It’s virtually impossible to get past the wall of young people who are engaged as customer services representatives but are not allowed to think for themselves and must blindly follow a pre-set script. They don’t appear to have basic training in mobile phone and internet operation. It’s also quite obvious that management in these companies are not in the least bit interested in their customers’ experience. Other than the ‘metrics’ they would periodically get on the volume of support calls and their resolution time, they haven’t a clue what’s really happening.
My recommendation to the industry:
- Empower your customer services staff. Give them some basic training and recognize them as the people working at the ‘coalface’; front-line staff who know exactly what customers are experiencing.
- Require a periodic report from each customer services unit describing issues customers are talking about. Put these through an AI tool and read the summary.
- Act on what you learn and fix the recurring issues.
You don’t need an MBA to figure this stuff out.
PS. I did try and post this to the Australia Telecoms group but they don’t acknowledge requests to join and prefer to keep the ramparts in place.
Williamson Author Site 