Telstra/Bigpond follies

2011-11-09T14:02:00.001+11:00

Ombudsman hits phone companies for a record $28 million as complaints soar

PHONE companies paid a record $28 million in fines to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman after the worst year for complaints against mobile, fixed and broadband operators.

The biggest phone companies contributed $24 million of that total. The TIO's annual report for 2010-11, released yesterday, revealed it received about 200,000 new complaints in the period, an increase of 18 per cent. This was despite a TIO campaign in 2009 to improve customer service, which saw a mild decrease in complaints in 2009-10.

Individually, Telstra received 78,950 complaints, Vodafone Hutchison 54,600, Optus 28,323 and iiNet 2974. The increase in iiNet's complaints was attributed to its acquisition of AAPT's residential customers.

The Ombudsman, Simon Cohen, singled out Vodafone for increasing the overall number of complaints after it recorded a 222 per cent increase in complaints against it during the financial year, at 35,563, up from 11,040 the previous year.

A Vodafone spokesman yesterday said it had improved network performance and service since late 2010 when it was flooded with complaints about coverage.

"Some of the network issues at the start of the year, and the ensuing rise in the number of complaints we received, impacted customer service," the director of customer service and experience at Vodafone Hutchison, Cormac Hodgkinson, said yesterday.

"This was difficult for our customers to endure, so we changed the way we operate to make things easier for our customers."

The company added 300 call centre staff, improved self-help portals and fast-tracked a significant upgrade to its overall network infrastructure.

Mr Cohen said he would like more powers to report companies to the communications regulator if systemic issues arose out of customer complaints.

Mr Cohen said the TIO was "actively exploring" whether it would report each company's customer numbers, which would give more meaning to the volume of complaints recorded against the company.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority may be more successful at tackling poor customer service through its threats to introduce court-enforceable standards if the telecommunications industry does not voluntarily improve customer service standards.

SOURCE

2011-08-12T11:50:00.001+10:00

Telcos' customers put through the wringer when they complain

PHONE and internet customers are spending more than nine hours battling their providers to resolve serious complaints.

Half of them are shunted between four or more departments in the process, an ombudsman's report will reveal today, the Herald Sun reported.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman survey of more than 500 customers who lodged complaints with the watchdog last year found that 100 of them were forced to endure more than nine hours of pleading their cases.

A third of customers surveyed spent more than six hours trying to resolve their problems. More than half spoke with their provider five or more times before going to the ombudsman, and 31 per cent of problems dragged on for more than three months.

Findings included:

MORE than half of respondents asked to speak to a supervisor but 65 per cent were refused and most were told one wasn't available.

ALMOST 40 per cent said their telco promised to help but did nothing.

ABOUT 60 per cent were not told when their problem would be resolved.

Customer service and complaint handling overtook billing and payments as the most common of the 170,000-plus complaints to the ombudsman last year.

The ombudsman, Simon Cohen, said the time telcos took to deal with complaints was a concern, but nine out of 10 cases could be resolved quickly once customers were referred to the right person.

"If that happened even more often there would be much less need for consumers to have to come to us at all," Mr Cohen said. "And I think that would be something that would be in everybody's interest."

Australian Communications Consumer Action Network chief executive officer Teresa Corbin said mandatory standards for handling customer complaints - such as time limits - were needed.

The measures were recommended in an Australian Communication and Media Authority draft report that is due to be finished this month. "I think the industry almost counts on customers to give up," Ms Corbin said. "They have had years to fix this. Time's up, telcos, it's time to improve your customer service once and for all."

Industry body Communications Alliance chief executive John Stanton said the industry was aware of the issue and working to address it.

SOURCE

2011-05-19T12:49:00.001+10:00

Another Telstra bungle upon bungle

Toowoomba mother hit twice with $91k phone bill

A $91,372 phone bill has Highfields mother of two Kym Ford at breaking point. Kym Ford is tired of getting the run-around by Telstra over a ridiculously large, $91,372 bill.

The Telstra bill, comprising mainly unknown SMS charges, is a mystery to Ms Ford. She contacted Telstra's complaints department to have the charges cleared and was told the “simple computer glitch” would immediately be corrected. But a month later she received another bill which this time had an outstanding balance of $91,412.98.

Ms Ford again contacted Telstra. “I was told that the first bill would be credited straight away and the complaint was closed,” she said. “But then they told me the second time that nothing had actually been done.”

Ms Ford said it just took some simple maths to shed light on just how ridiculous the charges were. At 25 cents a text message, she would have had to have sent 365,488 messages a month or eight messages every minute.

The ludicrous phone bills were not the last of Ms Ford's worries. After returning from holidays in January, she found an iPhone waiting for her complete with a bill of $1100. Ms Ford said she had never ordered or signed-up for the iPhone. “I sent it back to them straight away as I had only just signed up for this phone that I have now,” she said. “Now I'm receiving late charges for overdue amounts for this mystery iPhone.''

The overdue charges for the iPhone have added up to $340 which Ms Ford said was adding to the financial pressure she was already feeling. “As a single mother of two with a house to pay off, I'm afraid the overdue fees will affect my credit rating,” she said. “I don't understand why it's such a problem; all of the calls were recorded.”

A Telstra representative said the charges applied to Ms Ford were still being investigated and she would be contacted shortly. “It appears that the charges may be a result of fraudulent activity,” the representative said. “The customer may have replied to an email or phone call requesting her details.”

The representative said all of the charges relating to the iPhone would be waived.

SOURCE

2010-11-24T13:01:00.001+11:00

Telstra admits to another privacy breach

Telstra has admitted to breaching the privacy of some of its customers only after being contacted by this website. "Most, if not all, affected customers (less than 3000) have been rung over the past week or so," said Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton.

Those affected were using Telstra's Tribe service, a platform which aggregates social media including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Some customers' social networking sites that were accessed using Tribe could be accessed by other Tribe customers, Telstra said.

After being contacted by this website, Telstra published a blog post announcing the breach. "This is just so that people who read [the] story can find out info from us," Mr Middleton said

Telstra recently came under fire for being investigated by both the communications and privacy watchdogs after it sent out 220,000 letters that contained account information belonging to other customers.

It also came under fire in April, when technology website ZDNet Australia reported it breaching the privacy of 700 customers.
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"I’m accountable for Telstra’s approach to social media and all that goes with it. The good, the bad and the downright unfortunate," said Telstra's Kristen Boschma in the blog post.

"So I need to tell you something went awry with a service we offer called Tribe," she said. "We found a fault in the security for our Tribe service. Some customers’ pages could be accessed by other customers. We discovered instances where customers would have had the ability to access other customers’ Tribe accounts. In a couple of cases we were also contacted by customers to say that they received a Tribe alert meant for another user.

"To Telstra it is unacceptable that a customer’s privacy might be breached."

Boschma said Telstra has taken "direct and immediate action" to rectify the problem. "We suspended Tribe for a couple of days while we fixed it," she said. "It’s now back up and working like it’s meant to and we’ve already tried calling most affected customers directly. We’re continuing to contact all remaining affected customers. "Sorry for any inconvenience, this is not want we want for our customers but I’m glad the service has been restored."

SOURCE

2010-11-23T13:51:00.001+11:00

Phone and internet users lodged millions of complaints in 2010

As the big gorilla of the industry, Telstra would be responsible for most of these

MILLIONS of angry phone and internet users with hang ups about their providers are struggling to get problems fixed, new research claims.

A staggering one in two customers have had a telco gripe in the past year, a survey has found. And one in three who experienced a problem - equivalent to 2.3 million Australians - were unhappy with how their complaint was handled, according to the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.

Technical glitches, sloppy customer service, billing and complaint resolution topped nominated telco problems. A huge spike in complaints to the industry ombudsman has triggered a major federal inquiry that is due to report in early 2011.

But ACCAN policy director Elissa Freeman said the record 230,000 annual complaints that sparked the probe were just the tip of the iceberg. Ms Freeman said most frustrated consumers gave up on taking unresolved woes further.

Communications Alliance chief John Stanton said the industry was working hard to improve customer service, and was revising consumer protections. Mr Stanton said complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman fell 23 per cent last financial year after a peak a year earlier.

The New Galaxy research commissioned by ACCAN polled 1100 people early this month.

ACCAN is pushing for new mandatory standards to force telcos to respond to customer complaints sooner, reduce call waiting times, and help customers in financial hardship.

Upset customers who have made submissions to the Australian Communications and Media Authority inquiry include a businesswoman who said her Telstra number was shut down and given away because of an ``inexplicable error".

She then reportedly spent one to two hours on the line and was repeatedly transferred to different operators in a vain attempt for assistance.

SOURCE

2010-09-20T11:37:00.001+10:00

Telcos try to shift blame to customers

TELCOS are blaming technology-challenged customers for the surge in complaints about phone and internet services. The Communications Alliance and the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association - representing the nation's telcos - have admitted to a government inquiry that "there are problems in areas of customer management".

Gold Coast software engineer Kim Holley [above] has no trouble keeping up with the technology; her beef with Telstra BigPond is over a simple billing error.

Every month since March, Ms Holley has been charged a late payment fee for her internet account, even though her bills are direct-debited to her credit card. "I've probably spent at least two hours per month on this issue and I really would love to bill them for my time," she said yesterday.

"It's more the annoyance because I have a very busy travelling schedule for work, which is why I set up direct debit in the first place, and the bigger risk is they could turn off my service while I'm overseas."

Ms Holley said call centre staff assured her each time that the problem had been fixed. "Then it happens again, but every time I phone they have no record of me having called about the problem previously. I shouldn't have to explain the entire problem to them over and over and over again."

Telstra's director of customer service and satisfaction, Jules Scarlett, yesterday said Ms Holley's case would be investigated urgently. [Isn't publicity wonderful?]

Complaints against Telstra fell from 31,255 in the three months to September last year to 21,270 in the three months to June, she said. Telstra's share of industry complaints had dropped from 51 per cent to 45 per cent during 2009-10. "But this number is still too high so we're focused on making the improvements needed to simplify our business and better serve our customer," she said.

Industry-wide, complaints about phone and internet services fell 6 per cent last financial year, ending a seven-year cycle of soaring complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. The Ombudsman fielded 215,154 complaints from consumers in the year to June, down from a record 230,000 in 2008-09, according to confidential data provided to the industry.

Despite the fall, complaints have more than doubled in three years, and quadrupled in a decade. And as customers often complain about more than one problem - such as the failure to rectify an initial billing error - the number of issues totalled 481,418 in 2008-09.

ACMA has threatened to regulate unless the telco industry improves its customer service through the existing voluntary self-regulatory code of conduct.

More HERE

2010-09-06T09:11:00.001+10:00

Telecommunications regulator tackles telcos over poor service

Telcos are threatened with binding standards as customers make four complaints every minute. And as the big gorilla of the industry, this applies particularly to Telstra

PHONE companies' slack service to customers is unacceptable and they need to "do much better".

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has warned it will impose binding standards for customer service unless the industry improves its self-regulatory code of conduct, The Australian reports.

Authority chairman Chris Chapman said the existing poor standard of customer service was unacceptable. Mr Chapman said telecom customers' "exasperation and frustration" was shown by the "unacceptable trend line" in consumer complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

The ombudsman has been receiving complaints about billing, faults and connections of landlines, mobile and internet services at the rate of 1850 issues every weekday - or nearly four per minute.

"The banks used to be like this, but have lifted their performance over the past 10 years," Mr Chapman said yesterday. "I'm saying to the telco industry, your time has come." The telcos' customer service "is unacceptable and they've got to do much better".

The telecommunications industry is reviewing its three-year-old consumer protection code, which will require ACMA's approval next year.

At the same time, Mr Chapman said, if ACMA chose to impose its standards on the industry, telcos could be penalised for poor service. "We will invoke a standard in the event the code didn't provide sufficient consumer safeguards," he said. The standard would "open up telcos to a whole raft of enforcement possibilities". There would be a dramatic increase and toughening of the sanctions that existed under the voluntary code, he said.

Mr Chapman condemned the industry for failing to enforce its existing code of conduct. And he called for a "paradigm shift" in the way telcos treat their customers. "At the moment there is a disconnect between the provisions of the code and the outcomes, and the outcomes aren't good enough," he said.

"The future communications environment is going to be even more complicated than in recent times. "The industry will have to be even more creative and clever in the way it looks after customers."

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network said yesterday the telcos' existing industry code was "not worth the paper it's written on". "We need a commitment from the industry that it is prepared to comply with the code and issue public reports on its performance," acting chief executive Teresa Corbin said.

SOURCE

2010-07-28T13:28:00.002+10:00

Telstra fined $19m for blocking wholesale rivals

The claim that this was not deliberate is one of the biggest heaps of bovine dung that I have ever encountered

TELSTRA has been slapped with an $18.5 million fine for blocking its rivals from installing broadband equipment at its telephone exchanges.

An 18-month long federal court case came to its conclusion this morning after Justice John Middleton found Telstra contravened the Trade Practices Act and its carrier licence conditions on 27 occasions between July 2006 and April 2008.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was seeking a fine of $34m to be imposed on the telco giant, alleging Telstra’s senior management ranks had knowingly conspired to deny its wholesale customers such as Optus and iiNet access to install equipment in seven lucrative metropolitan telephony exchanges.

Under standard obligations, Telstra is legally required to allow access to its telephone exchanges so that competitors can install equipment to provide new voice and broadband offerings for customers.

Justice Middleton found that no such conspiracy had existed. “I reject any suggestion that the contraventions occurred as a result of any implicit or express direction from the then chief executive of Telstra to all Telstra employees to make access to competitors difficult,” Justice Middleton said in his judgement.

Telstra admitted in July last year that it was guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct in denying competitors access to its copper network -- but said the breaches were a result of the "chaotic bureaucracy" of the business rather than a deliberate ploy to disadvantage its competitors.

The contraventions -- of which there were 30 separate alleged incidents -- carried a maximum penalty of up to $10m each but Justice Middleton gave Telstra a discount on each breach.

"I have also given a greater discount for cooperation, acceptance of responsibility and for voluntarily implementing a compliance program,” he said.

Telstra won't appeal the decision. The telco vowed to improve business processes.

"Since the start of the case, we have acknowledged that mistakes were made. We accept the judgment which has been handed down. We will not be appealing," a Telstra spokesman said.

"Since these events occurred, Telstra has taken proactive steps to improve our processes in this area, and more generally, to improve service to our wholesale customers.

"We have learned a lot as a result of this process and like many changes at Telstra, we are endeavouring to improve our performance."

He said Telstra had cooperated with the ACCC on its investigation and implemented improved monitoring, processes and training.

As a result, no new exchanges have been capped since April 2008, the spokesman said.

Despite Telstra's penalty the telco's rivals were not entirely pleased with the outcome and reiterated the need for the government to pass legislation aimed at curbing the telco's market dominance.

"This is an example of anti-competitive behaviour from Telstra that the Government’s reform package is designed to stop at its source," Optus director of Government and Corporate Affairs Maha Krishnapillai said.

"Telstra has a very real ability to act unfairly under the present regulatory system, however the damage is done long before Telstra faces any penalties for its actions."

Source

2010-04-21T16:52:00.000+10:00

Regulator to get tougher on phone companies

Telstra abuses a big factor behind the change

TELEPHONE, mobile and internet providers will face hefty fines for breaching tough new customer service standards that will replace cumbersome voluntary industry codes.

Amendments to the Telecommunications Act will give the Australian Communications and Media Authority power to write consumer protection regulations and issue penalties of up to $250,000 for corporations and $50,000 for individuals in breach of the standards.

At the moment ACMA can issue infringement notices to broadcasters, but only has power to issue a formal warning to telecommunications companies before pursuing matters through the courts.

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said the changes would stem the flow of complaints made to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman; there had been a 118 per cent increase in customer service complaints last year.

The chairman of ACMA, Chris Chapman, said he would begin a formal inquiry into customer service in the telecommunications sector to "shine a strong light on complaints handling and the unresponsiveness of the industry to its customers".

He said codes developed by the industry took too long to develop and were cumbersome to change, leaving customers exposed to bad or deceptive service.

Telstra at work

An overzealous Telstra salesman nearly cost Sue Abbott, of Scone, $1400 after he convinced her to upgrade her mobile phone last year. But instead of the better deal she was promised, Ms Abbott promptly saw her bills double, including charges for a data plan she did not want or need.

Ms Abbott complained to Telstra, which caused her to run up even higher bills as she was "either left on hold or shipped around the world". "I would ring and try and explain my predicament and no-one listened. No one ever rang me back when I asked them to, or even offered to."

After a nine-month impasse, Telstra contacted Ms Abbott last week to say the charges would be erased from her account.

She said the inquiry was long overdue. "We're so in the dark about what the telcos can do," she said.

SOURCE

2010-04-19T12:55:00.000+10:00

Fleeing customers dent Telstra revenues

And it's no wonder customers are fleeing. Just ask almost any Telstra customer who has had problems with them

TELSTRA is unlikely to meet its current revenue forecasts, analysts have warned as they highlighted a decline in customer numbers as the company's biggest challenge.

Analysts and investors say declining customer revenue is a more significant threat to Telstra's long-term revenue than the proposed national broadband network. They are urging the company to cut retail prices to arrest customer attrition.

Telstra's cash flow was likely to be $400 million less than forecast this financial year, at $5.6 billion, a Goldman Sachs JBWere analyst, Christian Guerra, said in a research note.

His forecast is based on the decline in fixed-line customers and uncompetitive mobile and broadband plans. "The [first half of 2009-10 financial year] result highlighted some of the most concerning operating trends seen in Telstra's recent history," Mr Guerra said.

Its mobile phone plans were the least competitive, and its customer growth declined by 83,000 in the last six months last year. "Telstra's dilemma is clear. It does not want to lower its mobile pricing to accelerate the shift of high-margin traffic away from its fixed network and onto Australia's three mobile networks," Mr Guerra said.

Telstra's recent attempts to improve fixed and wireless broadband packages would slow customer attrition rates, but the prices were still uncompetitive, he added.

On December 18 Telstra warned sales revenue in 2009-10 would be lower than previously forecast because customers were leaving its fixed phone and broadband services faster than expected.

But the long-term trend was a more significant threat to Telstra's long-term profitability than the government's proposed broadband network, said a Perennial Growth partner, Richard Macdougall.

Institutional investors could expect Telstra's share price to weaken further if it does not make a deal with NBN Co, because that would add even more uncertainty to the company's future.

The government has threatened to forcibly split Telstra's retail network, divest its interest in Foxtel and deny it wireless spectrum if it does not migrate its fixed line traffic to the national broadband network.

Mr Guerra said a deal with the government was nearing and this could boost Telstra's share price.

Meanwhile, the Federal Court in Melbourne will hear a case this morning between Telstra and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on alleged breaches of the Trade Practices Act and Telecommunications Act.

The regulator alleges Telstra denied its competitors access to seven metropolitan exchanges to connect equipment to customer homes.

SOURCE

2010-01-16T10:35:00.002+11:00

UN-bl**dy-believable!

Telstra is steadily REDUCING its services to its Bigpond customers. First they cancelled the webspace they provided as part of a cable subscription deal. That was high-handed enough but they have now cancelled another service.

It was for years possible to access your Hotmail account via Outlook express. But no more. That option has been out of service for months but I thought it must be a result of something I had done. Not so. I eventually got around to emailing Bigpond technical support about it and below is the emailed reply that I got:

"We apologise for the inconvenience that you are experiencing and we understand your concern.

BigPond email accounts use the Post Office Protocol (POP3) protocol.

This protocol is incompatible with Hotmail. Hotmail uses a non-standard protocol for retrieving email, which is not compatible with all providers. Therefore, BigPond Technical Support does not support retrieving email using this method. However, we can refer you to one of our third party industrial partners called Gizmo. They support a wide range of products and services, including the issue that you are currently experiencing. Please be advised that they do charge a fee from a credit card however, will only do so if they fix your problem - if they are unable to then you won't be charged anything."

Do they run Gizmo? I wouldn't be surprised

2009-12-06T12:46:00.000+11:00

letter to David Thodey, CEO, Telstra

Thank you for your response to my letter to you and Ms Livingstone. You did get me some high-class attention from your staff

Sadly, however, most of the problem persists. Your staff did find the conditions under which I COULD upload to a BigBlog photo gallery but they are rather mad. I can upload only if:

1). I use the IE8 browser

2). I have the latest version of Java loaded

There are MANY photo hosting sites on the net and NONE of them have those restrictions. The restrictions are pure BigPond brainlessness.

About a third of Australians use the Firefox browser for a start and that is excluded by your very limited facility

May I suggest that the BigPond programmers need new blood? Someone should be fired if they cannot even manage a photo uploading facility of normal usefulness

2009-11-23T12:25:00.001+11:00

A typical Telstra experience

I too have got this sort of "service". One overseas helpline operator could not understand what I was saying at all so just hung up on me. Sheer arrogance. I should have been referred to someone higher up, preferably back in Australia

Like most horror stories, this one begins with an everyday setting where the familiar gradually gives way to the sinister. The first harbinger of the pain to come, not recognised at the time, was a letter sent out to me and millions of other Australians on July 20 by Ramon Gregory, "Executive Director, Customer Sales and Service", at Telstra, Australia's largest service company. This places Gregory at the centre of an enormous commercial machine, with huge databases, thousands of operators in call centres, and billions of customer inquiries recorded with Orwellian efficiency.

A study of the conditions in call centres conducted by Ruth Barton of RMIT University, released last week, found high stress levels and oppressive management control, as call centres field an average of 16 million calls a day.

Ramon Gregory's letter was also oppressive. It announced that people who paid their Telstra bill by return mail, or in person, or by credit card, would in future be charged a $2.20 "payment administration fee". He suggested various ways to avoid the fee, which actually did not avoid the fee at all. The letter was so infuriating and so poorly drafted that Telstra customers made their displeasure known in an outbreak of spontaneous combustion. Telstra rescinded the fee earlier this month.

But the company's latent aggression remains. Last Wednesday, my internet service was cut off by Telstra even though I have paid my bills on time, year-in, year-out, with a Telstra home phone account, and a Telstra cable account, and a Foxtel account. My bank statement shows Telstra banked my latest cheque on October 19. I had assumed I would be treated as a valued customer and notified before any drastic, summary action took place. How naive.

Telstra has shown, repeatedly, that it does not grasp the concept of political and consumer blowback. That's why the Rudd Government is destroying Telstra's market value, and why I have the Telstra support number, 133 933, programmed into my mobile phone, because losing service is part of the Telstra experience.

When I called Telstra's inquiry number at 9am last Wednesday, I got a "consultant" called Craig. When he turned out to be a drama queen, I began taking notes. When I suggested that Telstra should have contacted me before taking such draconian action, given my long history of reliability, Craig threw a tantrum. "You can't expect us to send out 50,000 notices to people," he said. Yes, I do. It's part of the service.

"You have to step up to the plate!" Craig replied. "It's your responsibility!" I asked him why he was treating me like a retard. He directed me to "credit management". I called credit management and got a message: "All our operators are busy. You have been placed in a queue." I was not surprised.

A heavily-accented young man came on the line and gave his name as "Matt". I realised I had been directed to a call centre in India when Matt insisted my name was not Sheehan. After he had called me "Mr Goodhope" three times I hung up.

The next operator was "Beau". He, too, was Indian, and simply not coherent. I politely abandoned the call and tried again. Next on the line was "Chari", another Indian. He was the first person I could describe as pleasant and competent that day. He set up a direct debit payment system for future bills, took care of the small outstanding amount, and thanked me for the call, the first of the five Telstra operators to do so. He said my service would be quickly restored.

It was not. It was still blocked the next day. And so the merry-go-round resumed. I was directed to technical support, because the billing department said there was no problem. A technician told me to switch off my modem and then try again. That did not work.

I called the original number again. Another heavily accented operator eventually responded. Her name was "Marie". "Are you in Australia?" I asked. "No," she replied. She told me I could not have my service restored because my account had not been paid. "You need to speak to the billing department." I told her I had spoken to the billing department at great length. She was adamant.

I called the billing department and Kirsty came on the line. She was working from a call centre on the Gold Coast. When I explained that she was the eighth person I had spoken to in two days, and my account was fully paid, she put me on hold and got someone further up the food chain. When she came back, she said the problem was a "shadow" payment system, which was showing my account to be inoperative. Kirsty was a pleasure to deal with, and restored my service.

The real problem was not the shadow payment system. It was the incompetent Indian call centre operators, and it was Telstra's attitude towards its customers. Nothing of my experience will show up on Telstra's key performance indicators.

And Ramon Gregory, it turns out, is yet another American brought in to run Australia's service giant. That explains his tin ear. I received another letter from him on Friday: "Telstra is reinventing the home phone," he proclaimed. He was selling an upgrade called the Telstra T-Hub. I'm interested in going in exactly the opposite direction - getting rid of the Telstra fixed line altogether. And that's just the start.

By the standards of global telco giants, Telstra is an efficient, productive enterprise, but you have to ask at what cost to us, the people who used to own the company, and are now the company's serfs?

SOURCE

2009-11-05T11:31:00.002+11:00

Bungled computerization worsens service

TELSTRA chief David Thodey admitted at the company's annual general meeting today that the telco's multi-billion dollar IT transformation project had stymied its ability to change prices on its products.

The admission came as one angry shareholder lambasted the board for having broadband prices that were way out of whack with the market.

The shareholder said he was no longer a Telstra customer because of the high prices and the company’s policy of allowing excess data charges on some plans to be unlimited, rather than sharply cutting or ‘shaping’ data transmission rates when a customer exceeded their plan’s allowance.

Mr Thodey reiterated a statement made last week at the company's update for investors that broadband price cuts were imminent and said the company’s ability to chop and change price plans had been constrained by its transformation project that began back in 2005 under former CEO Sol Trujillo. “For 12 months we have been unable to put new prices in the market due to the transformation," said Mr Thodey.

The pricing problems have hurt the company’s ability to grow market share. Fixed-line internet sales growth dropped from 20.5 per cent last year to 13.3 per cent this year.

Broadband shoppers don’t have to do much digging to find broadband deals far cheaper than Telstra.

A broadband customer after a fast ADSL2+ link with a data allowance geared to heavy use would pay $99.95 a month under current Telstra pricing for a 25GB per month data allowance, shaped to 64K once the cap was broken. Competitors have been offering far sharper pricing. As an example, ISP TPG advertises an ADSL2+ link with a 90GB allowance for $89.99 a month, shaped to 256K if exceeded.

Source

2009-11-03T11:11:00.000+11:00

Marathon gripe heading for Telstra AGM

A NSW man, tired of waiting more than eight years for a refund from Telstra, will confront the telco's annual general meeting in Sydney tomorrow to demand the issue be resolved.

Alastair Marshall has had little luck over the years but with a new Telstra boss onboard, he is feeling confident David Thodey could go where Sol Trujillo and Ziggy Switkowski would not.

More than two months ago Mr Marshall decided to air his grievances directly to Mr Thodey, who since taking the hot seat has pledged to focus on customer satisfaction.

Mr Thodey says he reads every customer complaint that lands on his desk.

Lengthy email correspondence between Mr Marshall and Mr Thodey, obtained by The Australian, reveals that the chief executive has personally intervened in the matter.

Since they both first communicated, however, discussions have reached a stalemate and Mr Marshall is frustrated that Mr Thodey has not been able to settle the matter.

The story began in January 2001 when Mr Marshall was trying to obtain a residential internet service to his home in the suburb of Hall, on the NSW-ACT border.

He was advised he would need a separate telephone line to connect to the internet.

After waiting and complaining to Telstra for more than 29 months, the company finally came to the conclusion that Mr Marshall did not require the extra line but still billed him for the service.

Subsequently, on August 6, 2003, Mr Marshall was offered a full refund of $1208, but there was a catch.

"We accepted the refund offer and agreed to Telstra's promise of our ISDN internet installation within 10 days," he said.

"However, Telstra said the amount would be given to us as credit. We paid them hard cash, so this was not acceptable."

It took nearly three years before the ISDN service was finally installed as "technical issues with the phone line and exchange" complicated matters, he said.

Mr Marshall then continued to push Telstra for a settlement and was offered $3560, but was told it also would be in the form of credit.

In 2006, when Mr Trujillo was at the helm, Telstra made an offer of $5000 to settle the matter, but the cheque never arrived, Mr Marshall said.

"After David Thodey became the new chief executive in June, he announced a new high priority for resolving customer problems. I thought this was a departure from the old mob," Mr Marshall said.

In mid-August, he raised his problems directly with Mr Thodey, who he described as "quite pleasant, humble and even apologetic" in their initial phone conversation.

By the end of August, Mr Thodey had made an offer of $8000 but that was rejected as inadequate.

"If you miss paying your Telstra account, within a week it's a $30 late fee plus a $20 administration fee and 22 per cent interest daily," Mr Marshall said, choosing to not to comment on an acceptable amount.

Mr Marshall has compiled copious amounts of documentation with Telstra and feels the offer is not fair, although Telstra begs to differ. "We have made a genuine effort to reach a fair outcome with Mr Marshall including offering him what most people would consider a very generous goodwill gesture back in August when David became personally involved," a Telstra spokesman said.

"We aim to resolve customer concerns as quickly as possible, but not all cases are black and white and in Mr Marshall's situation we feel we've exhausted all reasonable options."

Mr Marshall said he had been left with no choice but to pursue the matter at the AGM.

He continues to be a Telstra internet subscriber.

Source

2009-10-28T13:53:00.001+11:00

Telstra to cut prices on broadband

All of the below is good to hear but colour me skeptical about its implementation

TELSTRA has flagged price reductions for its broadband products and services as it fights to maintain market share in the highly competitive sector.

Chief executive David Thodey said price cuts were "imminent" as the telco wanted to compete aggressively on broadband offerings. "In some parts of the market we've gone too far out of line and we need to come back," he told an investor briefing.

Telstra's most recent annual results showed a drop in fixed broadband takeup, but its wireless broadband revenue grew by 69.2 per cent to $587 million.

A strong focus of Mr Thodey's presentation to investors was improving customer service. "We must focus on our core business and our customers, this is where we create value for shareholders," he said.

"At its simplest, the next stage in Telstra's long-term strategy is to focus on satisfying customers, invest in new capabilities, and drive growth in new businesses."

Source

2009-09-28T10:38:00.001+10:00

Telstra customers need to know this

ZERO is the hero which can give you back hours of your life by reducing time spent on hold by as much as 70 per cent.

Despite dwelling at the bottom of the keypad, it has been revealed that the humble 0 is at the top of the dial pile when it comes to fighting the dreaded automated phone "services".

It was in researching a cheat sheet to help readers beat interactive voice response (IVR) systems that The Daily Telegraph discovered the Power of None.

We found that when ringing Optus, pressing zero four times reduced the amount of time required to reach a real person to as little as 36 seconds.

By comparison, following the menu took more than two minutes. That's a time saving of 70 per cent.

The nought (dialled seven times) also stopped us getting caught on the line to St George, cutting the wait from over five minutes to 2 min 44 sec.

Whether it was AGL or the Commonwealth Bank, AAPT or Country Energy, "0" was the way to go if you simply wanted to speak to a human being.

The revelation is sure to anger big business and government, which have shelled out billions on systems seemingly designed to annoy the hell out of users.

But the real aim is to cut costs.

Minimising human contact keeps down customer service staff numbers, said Allan Asher, head of ACCAN, the telecommunications consumer organisation.

Cheat sheet

AGL: Press 0 three times

Centrelink: Press 0 at each prompt

Energy Australia: Press 0 then wait

Jetstar: Press 1 then 1

Telstra: Press 0 seven times

SOURCE

2009-09-15T20:22:00.000+10:00

TO: CEO, Telstra

Dear Sir,

I have just spent about half an hour wending my way through the maze that is required for me to recharge my mobile prepaid A/c online. At the end this is the message I got:

Mobile Number: 044828xxxx

Thank you. Your Recharge has been successfully processed.

Date: 15-09-2009 12:07 PM
Telstra Pre-Paid Mobile Number: 044828xxxx
Receipt Number: 2582870354
Current Account Balance: $53.93
Credit Expiry Date: 26-11-2009

Why was I given only an extra two months to spend the money? The $30 option I selected should have given me a year. Please adjust it.

I have tried calling various Telstra help numbers but when I finally got through to an operator he said that there was nothing he could do.

I have in total wasted half of my morning on this

Yours disgustedly

Dr John Ray

Update 22 Sept.

I have just got a call from a PR person admitting that Telstra goofed but she had no idea why the fault occurred and seemed uninterested in finding out why until I threatened to raise the matter with the TIO. I extracted a promise for an investigation and follow-up letter.

2009-09-15T11:08:00.002+10:00

Telstra will be forced to split by Government

Anything that cuts Telstra down to size sounds good to me -- JR

THE Rudd Government has introduced major changes to telecommunications laws, including the separation of Telstra. "Today we are delivering historic reforms in Australia's long term national interest," Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said this morning. "The Government will require the functional separation of Telstra, unless it decides to voluntarily structurally separate."

Telstra has been given the choice of voluntarily separating its infrastructure and retail arms in a manner approved by the competition watchdog.

If it chooses not to, the legislation will let the Government impose rules on the way it operates.

The rules include making sure Telstra charges other companies a fair price to access its network.

Telstra will also be prevented from moving into advanced wireless broadband unless it separates and divests its cable broadband and Foxtel assets. "These reforms will address Telstra's high level of integration to promote greater competition and consumer benefits," Senator Conroy said.

The changes, included in an update to the Telecommunications Act, will be tabled in Parliament today.

Senator Conroy said Telstra and the Government had already been in talks about the move. "Telstra are very constructively engaged in discussions with us already," Senator Conroy said. "They were very well prepared already when we had our first meeting."

The Government was flexible on how Telstra may choose to separate, he said. "The Government maintains an open mind on how structural separation may be achieved," he said. "It may include a new company Telstra that may transfer some of its fixed-line assets to."

Senator Conroy said previous governments of both persuasions had failed to address telecommunications reform. "The measures in this legislation will finally correct the mistakes of the past," he said.

Telstra has previously strongly resisted moves to separate its infrastructure and retail arms.

The new laws will also give more power to the competition watchdog and the communications minister to protect consumers and issue warnings to telcos. A new Universal Service Obligation will ensure "all people in Australia to have reasonable access on an equitable basis to standard telephone services".

It will also regulate the removal of payphones and include serious penalties – up to $10 million – for Telstra if it fails to comply.

SOURCE

2009-09-04T16:30:00.002+10:00

Telstra technical bungle takes a life

A clear case of a system breakdown. Emergency calls are supposed to be allowed even on a phone that is otherwise limited in some way. In this case the emergency exemption was clearly not operational and she got the normal "piss off" message

Perth lawyer John Hammond has called for a coronal inquiry into the death of Karl Feifar after his partner was unable to get through to the emergency 000 service on her home phone.

Kathleen Clarke today told 6PR radio that her partner collapsed around 10.30pm on May 29, and when she tried to call emergency services three times on her Telstra home phone she got a recorded message saying "this number is not available from this service".

She then spent 10 minutes running to a neighbour's house for help, before remembering she had a work mobile phone in her car and eventually getting through to 000.

She performed CPR on her partner while she waited for a St John's ambulance officers, who took a further 20 minutes to arrive at their Orelia home. By this stage the 36-year-old "looked dead".

He died from a cardiac arrest in hospital later that evening. "I wholly believe that the first 10 minutes did take his life," Ms Clarke said.

In a written statement, Telstra spokesman Craig Middelton said: "Mrs Clarke has our deepest sympathies for the tragic loss of her husband and Telstra will endeavour to continue talking to Mrs Clarke about the circumstances.

"We have conducted a high-level investigation of the situation and have found no faults with the service to the Clarke home or the 000 service, which manages more than 10 million calls per year.

"We also did not find any calls from Mrs Clarke's home phone made directly to 000." [Of course you didn't: Your system was malfunctioning!!]

Ms Clarke's Telstra home phone is set up on a pre-paid style plan known as an InContact service, but it is meant to allow 000 calls. Mr Middleton confirmed the 000 service should be a free call from any fixed or mobile phone.

Her contract states that Telstra would accept liability for breaching their contract or committing negligence if it caused personal injury or death.

Ms Clarke is now looking to sue the communications company, but she is waiting for the telecommunications ombudsman to conclude its investigation, including getting a clear explanation from Telstra about their actions.

"We would fully cooperate with an independent investigation into the facts," Mr Middleton said. "It would be inappropriate for us to debate the facts in the media."

Mr Hammond today lashed out at Telstra's actions, saying Ms Clarke had a valid case to sue for negligence.

"Her husband had collapsed on the floor. It was an outrageous suggestion to put to someone like that, and it was treating Kathleen with contempt, in my view, to put it to her that she never actually called 000," Mr Hammond said.

Ms Clarke said her partner's eight-year-old daughter just wants her father back.

"She's very distressed, she doesn't understand, she leaves him notes around the home everyday asking for him to come back," she said.

Meanwhile, Opposition health spokesman Roger Cook has called for a full parliamentary inquiry into the matter, criticising the slow response times to the emergency by St John's Ambulance.

"It is clear that St John Ambulance is not meeting community expectations and does not have the resources to do the job," he said.

"When a vehicle finally arrived, the staff started to work on Mr Feifar but advised Kathleen that they were waiting for another ambulance crew to come."

A Parliamentary Committee hearing has confirmed that at least another 50 full-time paramedics are needed in WA.

"Kathleen and her daughter deserve answers and a full parliamentary inquiry is the only way to ensure that all cases are investigated thoroughly and that people are able to give evidence with the full protection of the Parliament," Mr Cook said.

Mr Feifar won a gold medal representing Australia at the 1992 Barcelona Paralympics in the 4X100m relay and he went on to be awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to sport.

Source

2009-08-18T13:40:00.002+10:00

Amazing impudence: Telstra fined for phoning 'do not call' list

TELSTRA has been fined more than $100,000 by the Federal Government after it admitted making unsolicited phone calls to numbers on the 'Do Not Call Register'.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) received numerous complaints after the telco made calls to people on the register in 2008.

According to ACMA, an investigation found "inadequate compliance systems, procedures and supervision had contributed to calls being made to numbers on the Register where the consumers were not existing Telstra customers". Telstra admitted to the breaches and was fined $101,200.

"The ACMA expects large businesses like Telstra to be leading the way and setting an example when it comes to compliance with the Do Not Call Register – not falling behind," ACMA chairman Chris Chapman said in a statement. "The market leaders in the telco industry should consider themselves soundly on notice – size and complexity are no excuse for non-compliant practice."

Mr Chapman said Telstra has since paid the fine. "Telstra has paid the infringement notice, acknowledged that there is work to do, and is now setting about fixing these issues," Mr Chapman said.

The Do Not Call Register was launched in 2007 with 3.5 million phone numbers currently listed. ACMA said it had received 12057 complaints between May 2008 and May 2009, a drop from 2007 figures.

A Telstra spokesman apoligised for the company's behaviour. "Obviously, we are sorry that it happened, it shouldn't have happened and we have been working cooperatively with ACMA to put in a range of measures to stop it happening again," the spokesman said. "It was a combination of human error and a breakdown of our strict processes." [Strict processes?? That's a laugh!]

SOURCE

2009-08-06T10:10:00.004+10:00

The Gorilla Telco again

Telstra admits denying access

TELSTRA could face a fine of up to $300 million after admitting to the Federal Court it was guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct in denying competitors access to its copper network.

It is understood Telstra made the startling admission in a defence filing lodged with the Federal Court on July 31. In it, the telco admitted it had failed to comply with its access obligations as outlined under the Telecommunications Act 1997, thereby contravening a condition of its carrier licence.

The admission relates to a court case brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in March, which alleges Telstra violated its obligations to users of its unconditioned local loop services and line-sharing services.

Under standard obligations, Telstra is legally required to allow access to its telephone exchanges so competitors can install equipment to provide new voice and broadband offerings for customers.

The ACCC has said Telstra refused access at seven of its metropolitan exchanges by claiming they were full and there was no capacity left for rivals to install new equipment.

The watchdog also alleged Telstra engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct by publishing lists of capped exchanges on the Telstra wholesale website.

In the March filing, the ACCC said it would seek declarations, pecuniary penalties and injunctions against the telco.

The Telecommunications Act says a contravention can carry a penalty of up to $10m per breach. Thirty alleged breaches have been filed, but it is unclear how many of these Telstra has admitted guilt to.

The Federal Court in Melbourne yesterday held a directions hearing to gather additional evidence from access seekers before an appropriate penalty could be imposed by the court.

The next directions hearing has been set for October 2.

Telstra's humbling admission to the ACCC's allegations is in stark contrast to the combative stance the telco adopted under the tutelage of former chief executive Sol Trujillo.

But with Mr Trujillo out of the picture, new chief executive David Thodey has moved to clear its legal deck of any embarrassing anti-competitive misdemeanors.

Mr Thodey's conciliatory approach has helped mend bridges with the government and comes as the telco is preparing to re-engage the government with its new national broadband network plans.

SOURCE

2009-07-21T11:08:00.001+10:00

The ugly face of Telstra just got uglier

The new boss of Telstra is clearly no better than the greasy Mexican

TELSTRA customers who pay their phone bills in person will soon be charged for their efforts. The telco giant yesterday introduced a range of steep fees in an attempt to herd its customers into making online BPAY payments and to eliminate costly face-to-face customer service, The Daily Telegraph reports.

The penny-pinching tactic will cost as much as 2 per cent of every bill and is set to save it "several hundred million dollars" a year. From September 14, Telstra will charge a $2.20 administration fee for bills paid by mail or in person at a Telstra Shop or Australia Post. The telco's existing credit card payment processing fee will also rise to 1 per cent of the payment amount for MasterCard, VISA, and American Express cards, and 2 per cent for Diners Club.

However, so as not to penalise elderly customers, Telstra will exempt those with a pensioner or disability card from paying the new fees or credit card charges. Telstra Pensioner Discount customers or customers who have already registered their eligible pensioner card details with Telstra for the credit card payment processing fee discount are automatically exempt as are Telstra Disability Equipment Program product customers or those registered for another Telstra Disability Service.

All customers who pay their bills through an online savings or cheque account will also be exempt from the fees.

The telco said the fees were consistent with industry practice. "Every year we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on billing, which includes processing bill payments, paying third-party billing service providers, answering customers' questions about their bills and operating systems to support billing," Telstra Consumer Executive Director Jenny Young said. "We're introducing or changing our fees for some payment options which incur higher administration costs. "However, Telstra will always be conscious of customers who are experiencing hardship."

Ms Young said for customers with more than one Telstra service, the changes represented a chance to move these services on to a single bill to avoid fees if customers choose bill payment options that incur fees.

Since taking over Australia's largest telecommunications company in May, chief executive David Thodey talked openly about Telstra's tattered public image which has been crystallised by its increasingly poor customer service. A Telstra spokesman said yesterday the introduction of new payment fees would not contribute to a further erosion of public confidence in the telco. [Who does he think he is kidding?]

SOURCE

2009-07-20T12:02:00.001+10:00

Telstra as nasty as ever under its new management

If the new manager had been on top of his game he would have pulled out of this as soon as he took over

TELSTRA'S latest attempt to inflate the price of wholesale access to its copper network has backfired, with the Federal Court yesterday dismissing 14 legal claims launched by the telco.

The proceedings, which were launched against the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and 14 of the nation's largest internet service providers, including Optus, Macquarie Telecom and Primus, related to the access price that Telstra's competitors pay to use its copper network to offer voice and broadband services to consumers.

The copper-based services in question -- unconditioned local loop services (ULLS) and line sharing services (LSS) -- are used by many of Telstra's competitors to offer broadband services such as naked DSL to consumers. Naked DSL is a high-speed broadband offering that does not require a telephone connection to access the internet.

Currently the ACCC sets access pricing to Telstra's copper network at $2.50 a line per month for LSS services and $14.30 a month for ULLS.

But in Telstra's claim to the Federal Court, the telco argued that its competitors should be paying $9 a month for LSS and $30 a month for ULLS.

A rise in the monthly charge would out-price Telstra's competitors offering telephony and internet services in competition.

For more than five years Telstra has lobbied the competition watchdog to impose a $30 monthly access fee on wholesale customers who wish to use Telstra's copper network to deliver telephony and internet services to customers in metropolitan areas.

But in a reiteration of previous rulings on access pricing, Telstra's claims were dismissed by judge Kevin Lindgren after he found the current price declaration set by the ACCC was adequate.

Telstra has now been left to foot the combined multi-million-dollar legal bill for each of the 14 parties.

Telstra declined to comment on the judgment, but rival telco Optus did not hold back. "This is yet another failed attempt by Telstra to overturn an ACCC decision with a view to setting ridiculously high prices for access to its network. Telstra failed before the ACCC and now the Federal Court," Optus director of government and corporate affairs Maha Krishnapillai said.

"Today's outcome is a crystal-clear example of why, in the lead-up to the NBN (national broadband network), regulatory reform cannot be done on the basis of tinkering. The ACCC must be given tougher and more certain powers to ensure Telstra's ability to create delay, fear and dampen investment in the sector is eliminated."

ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel said the regulator was pleased with the outcome.

"It vindicates the robustness and the rigour that the ACCC applies in making these decisions and it potentially has some implications for the future decisions that we have to make in respect to a number of disputes we currently have before us," Mr Samuel said.

The long-running dispute between Telstra and the ACCC about access pricing has been a costly war for the telco.

In late April, the ACCC rejected an appeal from Telstra to charge its rivals $30 a month to use the telco's last mile copper network in metropolitan areas.

That decision is under appeal with the Australian Competition Tribunal.

Many of Telstra's legal wranglings are a legacy from the telco's combative former chief executive Sol Trujillo, who never shied from pumping millions of dollars into legal battles to maintain the telco's market dominance.

From HERE

2009-05-27T12:30:00.002+10:00

I know how it feels to be mistreated by Telstra, Sol Trujillo

By Holly Byrnes

DEAR Sol Trujillo, I hear you're feeling put upon, mistreated, disrespected, made to jump through hoops by faceless millions who did everything they could to wreck your job.

Mate, I know how you feel. I just spent the day trying to get reconnected to Telstra after my mobile was stolen.

The mugging was a shock but it's the horror of trying to activate a new SIM card and dealing with your dysfunctional telco that has me rocking in the foetal position.

Stripped of my handbag and knocked to the ground during the attack last week was nothing compared to being stripped of my will to live while waiting on line to Telstra.

Reconnecting seemed simple -- after putting a temporary block on my mobile I went to a T Life store in George St, Sydney, to buy a SIM card (the little chip which makes it work, in case any Telstra call workers are reading this and are not familiar with the term).

After settling the outstanding bill, then helpfully being transferred to a more economical contract, I was assured by the first service operator it wouldn't be too long before the phone was up and running again.

And so the wait -- and phone calls -- began. When my handset flashed up a SIM card error message, I called for some of that customer service I'd heard about.

That call was answered by a service operator who asked me to phone back in an hour, when the account would be ready. I was given a 1800 number for direct "service"'.

An hour later that number reached a recorded Telstra message that informed me the number was no longer in service, and redirecting me to another "service".

That number told me I needed a reference number. Without one, I should access a Telstra website. But to do that I'd need an active mobile.

When another operator told me to call the first 1800 number I took a breath then updated him with the recorded message I'd received. He put me on hold to check.

When he returned, he asked to check my bona fides then quizzed me about the driver's licence number on the account.

He wasn't convinced when I told him I didn't know the number. Not because of bad recall but because I have never held a driver's license in my life.

His response? He put me on hold. When he asked me for my birthdate, I joked I should add a few years since I had aged some in the course of these phone calls. Laugh? Nope, he put me on hold.

Even after emailing a PR contact within Telstra, after an initial response, there was still no sign of my mobile service.

However, when I posted my aggravation on Facebook I was inundated.

One mate, David, was trying to prove to Telstra he lived where he said he did because they were refusing to connect a phone to his home. In his words: "Why would I want to connect a phone in a place I don't live?"

Another girlfriend directed me to a support group on Facebook called "Telstra SUX".

And the best bit? It doesn't ask for your name, birthdate, mother's maiden name, driver's licence or first-born child before you get the satisfaction of emptying your spleen.

So, Sol, save yourself a call to Telstra and log on, mate. For once, you'll be in good company.

Source

2009-05-09T12:19:00.001+10:00

The new chairperson of Telstra

The profile below is laudatory but other comments suggest that she is more of a bureaucrat than a business person

HAVING accepted the job of chairman at one of Australia's largest and most important companies, Catherine Livingstone is facing the biggest challenge of her career.

The former accountant has been widely lauded for her role in transforming the bionic ear-maker Cochlear into an internationally renowned business. And she is no stranger to public company boardrooms or to dealing with government, having chaired the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation for five years.

But Telstra -- with more than 1.4 million individual shareholders, including the federal Government's Future Fund, and facing a critical time in its history -- is an entirely different beast.

Not that that should faze the self-confessed risk-taker, who lives on Sydney's lower-north shore with her husband, Saatchi & Saatchi finance chief Michael Sattherthwaite, and their three teenage children.

Those who have worked alongside Livingstone point out that she has taken seemingly large career jumps before, with repeated success. Her resume -- Telstra, Macquarie Group, Worley Parsons, and formerly Rural Press and Goodman Fielder -- speaks of an experienced and coveted commodity.

The Macquarie University honours graduate started her career at the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse in the late 1970s, working in Sydney and London, before making the switch to the publicly listed medical device group Nucleus, where she worked in various accounting roles.

Livingstone was soon promoted to chief finance officer and in 1994, following a takeover of the group by Pacific Dunlop, she was appointed chief executive of its subsidiary company, Cochlear.

One of her main tasks was to groom the emerging device maker for a public float.

One executive who worked closely with Livingstone throughout that period remembers her ability to communicate effectively with investors and the broader financial markets.

"She was able to build a phenomenal relationship with the financial community for the listing and then afterwards," said the executive, who declined to be identified.

"She's a very, very organised and systematic person -- very process driven, very detail-minded.

"She was also able to improve the internal processes within the company."

When Cochlear was floated for $125 million in 1995, it was bringing in $70 million a year in revenue.

When Livingstone left the company five years later, the device was being sold into 50 countries worldwide and sales had swelled to $150 million.

Its market capitalisation was almost $2 billion.

Born in Kenya in 1955, Livingstone had migrated with her family to Australia by the time she started school.

Her leadership skills emerged early, and as an 11-year-old she was appointed house leader for the school sports carnival.

Livingstone has said she was greatly influenced by her parents -- her mother was a teacher and her father served in the air force during World War II, later becoming an economist and investment banker.

In John Eales's book Learning From legends: Business, published last year, Livingstone recalls that her mother repeatedly emphasised to her: "If it's worth doing, do it properly."

"My parents have always influenced me strongly in terms of professionalism."

In a magazine interview published in 2007, Livingstone revealed that her parents had also encouraged her to take risks.

"You have to learn how to step out of your comfort zone. Being afraid is not something to be afraid of," she said.

Livingstone joined Telstra as a non-executive director in November 2000.

When the board ousted former chairman Bob Mansfield and later chief executive Ziggy Switkowski in 2004, she was briefly touted as a possible candidate for chairman but apparently declined to put her hand up for the role.

The job went instead to Donald McGauchie, whose surprise resignation yesterday has suggested that Livingstone's appointment didn't follow the orderly succession process to which boards typically aspire.

Some observers have highlighted her lack of direct telecommunications industry experience (outside of her Telstra board role), and some have questioned whether her fierce attention to detail could work against her in a role in which the big picture is important.

One of her key roles will be to rebuild the telco's fractured relationship with the Government, which hit an all-time low following its exclusion earlier this year from the tender process to build the multi-billion-dollar national broadband network. However, previous comments attributed to Livingstone suggest that she might be willing to take a more conciliatory approach to dealing with politicians than that of McGauchie and the company's outgoing chief executive, Sol Trujillo.

"You have to put yourself in other people's shoes and see how they're looking at something and then try and make the persuasive argument for the outcome you're seeking," she says in Eales's book.

"You can tell people what's happening but telling is not very constructive ... if you can persuade, that's better."

At her first press conference as Telstra chairman yesterday, Livingstone said the company was focused on "a very constructive engagement" with the federal Government.

Businessman Peter Yates, who chairs the board of scientific lobby group the Royal Institution of Australia, of which Livingstone is a director, praised her ability to deal with people.

"She's an extremely thoughtful person who inherently likes people and inherently gives people the opportunity to achieve their full potential," Yates said.

"I can imagine ... (that she) and the new chief executive, David Thodey, who I also know quite well, will make a very good team."

Chris Roberts, Cochlear's current chief executive, who worked alongside Livingstone in the 1980s, described her as highly intelligent, hard working and capable.

"As a shareholder of Telstra and someone who has known her for many years, I think she'll do a very good job."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25450523-643,00.html

2009-05-08T10:46:00.003+10:00

New bosses for Telstra

TELSTRA has replaced its two leaders, appointing current senior executive David Thodey as chief executive officer and current board member Catherine Livingstone as chair.

Ms Livingstone replaces Don McGauchie effective immediately. Mr Thodey's appointment takes effect when incumbent CEO Sol Trujillo leaves Telstra to return to the United States.

Mr Thodey said he was delighted to be appointed chief executive of Telstra and looked forward to building on the strong foundation left by Mr Trujillo's four years at the helm.

"Our strategy remains unchanged: to continue to provide customers with world-class products and services," he said. [World class bullsh*t, he means]

The key to Telstra continuing to win and to serve customers will be finishing our transformation that started nearly four years ago. [It sure needs a lot of finishing]

"Completing the transformation will enable us to deliver a superior customer experience [How about putting enough people on the helpline so customers aren't told to ring back later? That should be easy even for a Telstra CEO] and the financial outcomes that our shareholders expect."

Mr Thodey, 54, has been a senior executive at Telstra for eight years. He joined Telstra from IBM where he was chief executive of IBM's Australian and New Zealand operations. In his current position, he has been responsible for Telstra's corporate, government and large business customers in Australia, TelstraClear in New Zealand and Telstra's international sales division.

McGauchie quits, 'speculation a distraction'

With the chief executive selection process complete, Mr McGauchie resigned as Telstra Chairman and said he would leave the board immediately. "Telstra's strength and ongoing performance are the paramount priority," Mr McGauchie said. "It is my view that speculation on my tenure was a distraction to the business. "Nothing should be allowed to get in the way of David and the management team getting on with the important job ahead of them." [He means that he knows he was a deadhead who was no check on the slimy Trujillo]

The Telstra board also has appointed Telstra's chief financial officer John Stanhope, a contender for the CEO's position, as an executive director of the Telstra board.

The controversy surrounding building materials supplier James Hardie Industries' handling of its responsibilities to the asbestos diseases fund claimed another casualty when Telstra said another director, Peter Wilcox, also was leaving the board, "due to his concern that the James Hardie judgment may cause embarrassment to the company".

The Telstra board had asked Mr Willcox to stay on until the telco's annual general meeting in November, which he had agreed to do. Mr McGauchie also is a director of James Hardie.

Telstra's new chair, Ms Livingstone, has been a director of the company since 2000. [Is that all they can say about her? Sounds like she is a nothing too]

SOURCE

2009-05-01T11:16:00.000+10:00

CHEEESH!! For once Telstra is doing the right thing and some !@#$%^& judge blocks them

These "Premium" SMS services seem to be almost entirely a con. Check your bills for them. I was billed for such services myself when I was with Vodafone, although I had never asked for or received such services. Voda promptly reversed the charges when I complained but refused to co-operate with any investigation of how the charges arose. And the TIO seemed to think that no investigation was needed because Voda had reversed the charges. Prevention of fraud is obviously not one of their priorities. I think I know how I got targeted but nobody wants to hear it apparently. I even wrote to ACMA but they too refused to take any interest. The crooks who targeted me were called "Mobile Messenger"

TELSTRA has been blocked in its bid to throw an SMS service off its network after it received a high number of complaints from annoyed customers. Telstra wants to disconnect premium SMS supplier Oxygen 8 because it has received a "disproportionately large" level of complaints about its service.

The NSW Federal Court was told traffic to Oxygen 8's services tripled between October 2007 and January 2009, The Australian has reported. The court also heard evidence from a report by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman that nearly two-thirds of complaints about premium SMS services were from customers who said they had never signed up to receive them.

In February, Telstra gave Oxygen 8 60 days' notice that it would be dropped from its network, citing a clause in the contract between the two companies which would allow it to do so. Oxygen 8 was granted an injunction against being dropped while it challenged the action in the courts. It says Telstra's system for handling complaints is in breach of their contract and federal rules. Telstra had been trying to have that injunction dropped and Oxygen 8's claim dismissed, but in court yesterday Judge Geoffrey Flick ordered the injunction remain in place.

Judge Flick ordered the two companies to begin preparations for a trial starting on July 27. He gave Telstra leave to apply to vary the orders, including lifting the injunction. Telstra refused to enter into mediation with Oxygen 8 to settle the matter out of court.

A Telstra spokesman said: "Telstra is confident about the validity of its termination notice and its prospects on the final hearing. Telstra is committed to the responsible provision of premium SMS services."

Oxygen 8 has alleged that Telstra's SMS complaints handling systems and procedures are inadequate and in breach of the ACMA Telecommunications Service Provider (Mobile Premium Services) Determination 2005 (No1).

SOURCE

2009-04-11T13:31:00.001+10:00

$62k claim for loss of Telstra internet service

A NORTHERN beaches tourism operator says he lost $62,000 worth of potential business because his Telstra internet service dropped out for almost three days. Michael Heaver, of Kewarra Beach Resort, said internet access dropped out on Monday and was not fixed until Thursday.

During that time he was unable to meet deadlines and tenders for accommodation quotes, missing out on more than $60,000 of business. "And that is a conservative quote," he said. "We had three serious quotes awaiting confirmation, from the US, UK and Germany and the clients have actually gone elsewhere simply because we did not have that information for them."

Mr Heaver, who is on a Telstra business plan, said times were already tough for tourism operators without having to worry about losing internet access. "We have also had people inquiring whether we are still open," he said. "Obviously, with the current climate there is a lot of nerves and the damage to our reputation has been significant."

Mr Heaver is now talking to Telstra about compensation after making several calls to the telco during the three-day blackout. "This is an essential service but it is not given the priority it deserves," he said. "Livelihoods are being lost simply because the priority given to these issues is pathetic. "It is heartbreaking to see the loss of potential business we have suffered."

A Telstra spokeswoman said she was unable to comment on Mr Heaver’s case, but said Telstra had compensation avenues available. She said any claim would depend on the internet plan Mr Heaver was on and said the specifics of his compensation claim would be worked through over time.

SOURCE

2009-04-06T10:33:00.000+10:00

Telstra complaints are up by 240 per cent under CEO Sol Trujillo

Why am I not surprised? Trujillo fired a lot of Telstra staff and helpline staff seem to have been among them. And that would explain the comment highlighted below -- a complaint that coincides with my experience

CUSTOMER complaints about Telstra's phone service rocketed by a massive 52 per cent in just 90 days, company statistics have revealed. And over the three-year reign of Telstra boss Sol Trujillo, complaint levels have risen by 241 per cent, figures from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman show.

Mr Trujillo has been paid about $30 million over the same period, and is to receive a $3 million golden handshake when he steps down in June. "It's frustrating because you can't get through and when you do no one can tell you anything," Telstra Bigpond customer Michael Murray told The Courier-Mail.

Between October last year and the end of 2008 Telstra received about 236 complaints a day, or nearly 10 an hour, about landline and mobile phone services over the three months, for a total of 21,283. In the previous three months the phone giant received 14,014 complaints.

Over the same period, complaints about Telstra's Bigpond internet service climbed 65 per cent, from 3382 to 5607. Mr Murray complained after his internet connection was down for four days last week, calling Telstra "10 to 12 times" asking when the problem would be fixed.

Telstra executive director of corporate complaints Chloe Monroe said the company "acknowledged these are not good results". She said the company had put more resources into taking customer calls. Ms Munroe said it would be "drawing a long bow" to see a connection between Mr Trujillo's time at the top and the number of complaints. [What or who else, then??]

SOURCE

2009-04-01T12:01:00.003+11:00

Telstra negligence again

Only the few people there with personal integrity care about doing a good job. Why should the rest bother? They get paid the same regardless and are effectively unaccountable

TELSTRA has been forced to apologise after full-frontal photographs of scandal-prone league player Todd Carney ended up on a rental phone in Canberra.

Louise Hallam, 23, was stunned to find the photos left on a second-hand Samsung handset lent to her by a Telstra shop while her own handset was being repaired.

After picking up the handset on Saturday, Ms Hallam said she looked through the phone's memory and was stunned to find the clearly recognisable photos of Carney, posing in lewd photographs.

"I was shocked at the fact that Telstra gave me a phone that had, well, basically pornography on it," Ms Hallam said yesterday.

"I thought they would have at least filtered the phone or cleared the memory. I was upset when I saw it, and then I realised who it was."

Carney confirmed he had used a Nokia handset to take the explicit images of himself in front of the bathroom mirror while home alone late one night at his Goulburn home "about six months ago".

The beleaguered player - sacked from the Canberra Raiders after a string of high-profile drunken misdemeanours said he had forwarded the photos to a girl he met on social network site Facebook some months later after she exchanged a lewd photograph of herself.

"She'd asked me to take them before ... I don't want to go back to that night though," he said.

Carney said he was at a loss as to how the photos ended up on the handset, but speculated they may have been forwarded by an unknown person who picked up the Nokia handset he lost in January.

"They're the only ones like that that I ever took, so it must be them," he said yesterday.

He said he succumbed to the girl's multiple requests for a photo, eventually sending those he had stored on his phone.

"She sent me a photo then I sent her some back. Obviously it's the photos in the wrong hands now."

Carney's manager David Riolo yesterday claimed an anonymous woman had attempted to blackmail him over the pictures yesterday.

Ms Hallam said she never contacted Mr Riolo asking for money and has never met Carney.

A Telstra spokesman yesterday confirmed a handset had been lent to Ms Hallam and said the telco would investigate why personal data was not deleted.

SOURCE

2009-03-26T13:37:00.000+11:00

Telstra fails the public respect test

TELSTRA'S efforts to cast itself as a good corporate citizen appear to have failed. The telecommunications and media company has come near the bottom of the class for corporate behaviour on such hot topics as executive salaries and fair wages for staff.

Woolworths, on the other hand, came top of a Herald survey that explored consumer expectations of large Australian and Australian-domiciled international companies.

Taken during the fall-out over Pacific Brands and the huge payouts to executives at the failed insurance group AIG, the survey by a researcher, The Leading Edge, records what people believe companies should be doing to gain their respect and trust.

Most large corporates are failing to rein in excessive salaries of their executives but are recognised to be doing more about paying their staff fair wages, the survey of 1500 people shows.

Overall, companies are performing badly in three areas consumers regard as important - what companies are doing to limit their impact on the environment, whether they conduct their business in an open and transparent manner, and whether they impose limits on executive pay and bonuses.

However, all of the large companies included in the report (see below) were, to varying degrees, seen to be providing equal opportunities to staff, paying fair wages and treating their customers with respect.

Areas that are often the focus of corporate marketing campaigns, such as supporting charities, community projects and activity in developing nations, are not regarded as important by Australian consumers.

The study also highlights how much responsibility individuals assign to governments and business to get the country out of the current doldrums; a third of that falls to the Federal Government, a third to big business, and the remainder shared by state governments, local communities and, lastly, the individual.

The survey will make uncomfortable reading for Telstra. Of the 10 companies in the survey only international packaged goods giants Unilever and Procter & Gamble recorded lower scores. People said they were least likely to speak favourably about Telstra than any other company and, more worrying, almost a quarter said they were more likely to bad-mouth Telstra - nearly four times the number for Woolworths, Coles and Nestle.

Conversely, three quarters of the people surveyed said they were most likely to talk favourably about Woolworths than any other company. Woolworths, which registered the highest score in the key criteria, was also regarded as the most ethical company, twice that of its nearest competitor, St George.

Karen Phillips managing director of TLE Sydney, said the research shows Woolworths is more successful in bridging the gap between the corporate face it projects and the day-to-day experience of customers.

"From a corporate perspective Woolworths has done very well, largely because it's put a lot behind a very effective [marketing] campaign that gives a warm human face to the company.

"But I think as much as Telstra may have worked at it [corporate social responsibility], they have not really generated a level of connectivity at a human level with their recent campaign."

A Telstra spokesman acknowledged it had work to do. He said: "Telstra treats with great seriousness any feedback about the company's reputation."

SOURCE

2009-03-26T13:09:00.002+11:00

Telstra cannot take criticism

Not terribly surprising, given how much there is to criticize

LESLIE Nassar, aka Fake Stephen Conroy on Twitter, says he has been fired from his job as Telstra's iPhone expert for speaking out about the telco.

Mr Nassar, who only yesterday revealed his fears about his job to The Daily Telegraph, this morning said he had been sacked by Dr Hugh Bradlow, who is Telstra's Chief Technology Officer, and Greg Callaghan, a director in that Office.

Telstra says it has begun a "disciplinary process" against Mr Nassar, but not fired him.

Still, when Mr Nassar got off a flight from Melbourne to Sydney this morning he posted this following on Twitter under Fake Stephen Conroy.

"Just landed in Sydney. If I have been fired, nobody has told me about it."

That was at about 8.20am.

Then at 8.50am: "Okay, I've been fired for contravening Telstra's AWA that mandates that you don't criticise Telstra - ever - even in jest."

A minute later: "Let me make it absolutely clear; the folks working in the CTO do extraordinary work. I'm sorry to lose my workmates."

Then two minutes after: "Hugh Bradlow (Telstra CTO) and Greg Callaghan are both good, smart guys. They're enforcers in this, not puppet-masters."

When The Daily Teleraph then asked if Mr Nassar if he had been sacked, he said: "Yep. Just now, by Hugh Bradlow and Greg Callaghan for, they say, contravening the Satirical Smack-Talk policy."

A Telstra spokesman said: "Leslie Nassar has not been fired. However, we have started a disciplinary process against him - not because of his Fake Stephen Conroy blogs but because of his ongoing unauthorised public statements about Telstra, including abusive comments towards a Telstra employee."

SOURCE

2009-03-12T15:28:00.002+11:00

Arrogance and incompetence from Telstra yet again

Footscray family's Telstra battle lasts 18 months -- and again it was only media attention that got any action

TELSTRA has admitted to double dipping a battling Footscray family's internet account - and 18 months later it has still not paid back the money.

Musician Wade English discovered by accident that the company had been charging him for broadband and dial-up internet services at the same time.

He lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman and was then told by Telstra the matter would be fixed within 24 hours.

Mr English's was one of a staggering 52,304 billing issues lodged against telecommunication, internet and phone service providers in Australia last year.

It took 40 complaints before Telstra offered to reimburse him $646.80 and cancel his dial-up service last December.

At the time of the error, the Aussie telco admitted in writing that Mr English was entitled to a refund. It said it would terminate his dial-up service and hand over the refund within 30 days. What followed was a nightmare.

"They didn't follow up with any money, but what they did do was totally disconnect my internet service, both dial-up and broadband. I went six or seven weeks without it," Mr English said. "I finally gave up and switched to Optus. "But in that time I reckon I lost about $10,000 in work that would've been booked through my internet site."

When Mr English called Telstra to see where his refund was, he was told he did not have an account and so could not be traced on the Telstra computer system.

Mr English said he wanted to encourage other people to challenge Telstra and other large corporations.

In documents seen by the Herald Sun, Telstra acknowledged it overcharged Mr English for two years and offered to pay back $646.80. Only after the Herald Sun contacted Telstra did the company offer to send a cheque.

"We have spoken to the customer and apologised for the inconvenience caused," Telstra spokesman Martin Barr said, adding the matter was being investigated.

Source

2009-01-08T12:37:00.002+11:00

Telstra refuses to hang up on Melbourne customer's 8c bill

How pathetic that you have to resort to newspaper publicity in order to get a crazy bill looked at!

PHONE giant Telstra has spent five months bombarding a customer with demands that he pay a measly eight cents. The telco, which streamlined bills for millions of customers last year to save on paper, repeatedly spat out reminders to Melbourne man Craig Mackley.

Mr Mackley dismissed the request for an 8c credit card payment-processing fee as a joke.

He was swamped with double-page monthly forms after settling a $10.08 mobile phone account in August last year.

"You'd think they'd wake up and get their house in order and stop wasting money," he said.

"I hadn't rung them about it because I thought it was a bit silly and ridiculous. But they keep sending the bill and I keep laughing at them."

The telco, which returned a $3.69 billion profit last financial year, overhauled its bill format several months ago and pledged to cut down on paper.

It is changing to a new system that will stop repetitive requests for tiny amounts of money.

The carrier apologised and cancelled Mr Mackley's overdue account when contacted by the Herald Sun.

"We have removed the charge to the customer and apologise for any inconvenience caused," spokesman Martin Barr said.

Source

2008-12-12T10:12:00.001+11:00

Typical Telstra

Bill was fit all his life, but last month he felt a little breathless. A sticky heart valve was diagnosed and he had a pacemaker fitted.

On November 13, he is released from hospital and returns to his Deception Bay home where Yvonne, 84, awaits. That is a Thursday. In the morning, the home telephone is working fine. By afternoon, it has been disconnected.

Jacqui rings Telstra. They say the bill had not been paid. "My parents had received no initial bill, no reminder notice or courtesy call. They are of the generation who always pay their bills before the due date. I doubt they have had an overdue bill in their life."

Thursday, November 13: She pays the bill immediately over the phone and explains her dad's medical situation. The phone will be reconnected within two hours, she's told. Hours later, the phone is still dead. Jacqui rings Telstra and is told the credit department is closed and nothing can be done. Ring back Friday.

Friday, November 14: Jacqui phones Telstra. "I spent over an hour being transferred everywhere."

She eventually is advised the phone will be reinstated "in two hours".

Meanwhile, Bill and Yvonne are at home – with no transport and no phone. Two hours later, still no connection. Bill's other daughter, Maureen, tries talking to Telstra. No joy. So, at 3.30pm Friday, Maureen contacts the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (1800 062 058). The TIO person gives her a direct number to contact Telstra and says if the phone is not reconnected within two hours to get back in touch.

Maureen spends another lengthy period on the phone, only to be told the computer system is down and nothing can be done until Monday.

All up, the sisters spend more than six hours on the phone to Telstra trying to resolve the problem.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, one of the Telstra voices tells Jacqui there is still an outstanding amount of $8.98 on her parents' account. Now, this is news. This is the account she paid in full after the phone was cut off. She checks her credit card and yes, the payment went through. So where are we? That's right Saturday.

Saturday, November 15, 5.05pm: Phone still not connected. As the family feared, Bill's condition worsens and he is taken to Redcliffe Hospital. Late that night, he is transferred to St Andrew's Hospital. There is heavy city traffic, so the ambulance officer suggests the family not follow but come in the morning. "Dad wanted us to get mum home, as it had been a long day for her."

Saturday, November 15, 10.30pm: The hospital calls. Bill Fildes has died.

Sunday, November 16: There are funeral arrangements to make, friends to be called, but still no phone.

Monday. . .Tuesday: Still disconnected.

Wednesday, November 19: The phone is connected, six days later.

Thursday, November 20: Bill's funeral is held at Deception Bay.

Now, you may be thinking that's the end of it. No. Not by a long shot. Telstra still has something in store for this grieving family.

Friday, November 21: Yvonne receives a bill for her but incorrectly addressed. The bill is for $17. It kindly extends her time to pay until December 1 "so as not to inconvenience her". Jacqui is incredulous. "Can you believe this?" She spends an hour trying to sort it out. Telstra assures her the bill will be wiped.

Monday, November 24: Yvonne receives another bill. Nothing has been wiped. She is an 84-year-old woman. She has just lost her husband of more than half a century. She is grieving. She doesn't have the energy to fight a huge corporation like Telstra. She just wants it all over. I'll just pay the $17, she tells her daughters.

Telstra wins. Little person loses. Business as usual.

Telstra did something cruel to the Fildes family. It wasn't personal. It rarely is in today's corporate world. It's mostly just pure ineptitude. No one takes ownership of the problem to fix it and the corporate structure doesn't encourage employees to care. It encourages them just to hope like hell the difficult customer gives up and goes away.

It's endemic in business in Australia today. There's a culture of The Facade of Service. That is: Pretend to give service, while actually trying to get rid of the person wanting service ASAP. You get it in banks, you get it in the health system, you get it in shops. You ring, they stonewall. You must be wrong. You are an idiot. Then, at the end of call, they say: Is there anything else I can do for you today?

Telstra did not treat the Fildes family like people. They didn't treat Bill and Yvonne with dignity. They treated them like An Account.

It is utterly dehumanising. And this is the company bidding for Australia's "world-class national broadband network". Put your trust in us, says Telstra, we'll take care of you. Sure.

I contacted Telstra for a response. Here it is: "We offer our sincere condolences to Mrs Fildes and her family for their loss. Telstra fixed-line customers temporarily disconnected for non payment are still able to ring a range of telephone numbers including Triple 0."

If I hadn't already taken my business away from Telstra years ago, I would do it right now, just for what they did to Bill and Yvonne Fildes.

SOURCE

2008-12-09T11:38:00.002+11:00

Telstra users left with exposed lines

How little things change! I had exactly this problem in the '70s when Telstra was fully government-owned. It was only by writing to the Minister that I got the work completed

THOUSANDS of Telstra customers are putting up with crude, temporary phone connections with cables held together by tape and plastic bags and strung along fences, across lawns and through trees. In many cases the unsightly - even dangerous - cables are left in place for months and even years, despite repeated pleas to finish the job by burying them.

Colin Barraclough has endured a temporary "lead-in" cable running from the street across the ground and over his garage for 18 months after a fault was patched up at his Greystanes home. His neighbour accidentally severed the connection with a hedge trimmer recently, leaving him without a phone for three days - but the line remains unburied.

"Every time I call I'm told that Telstra has more important and urgent work to do and I will just have to wait," he said. "I cannot be given a time frame as to when the cable will be buried. I might have to wait another 12 months."

On the Central Coast, Robin Williams has put up with a temporary line since May. In that time she has tripped over it while recovering from eye surgery and her husband has accidentally cut it with a hedge trimmer.

"When I last contacted Telstra, I was told it … might be 12 to 18 months before anything was done," she said. "Even my suggestion that the temporary line could cause a serious accident counted for little, with one officer telling me I would just have to be careful. We are beginning to believe that Telstra has no intention of ever doing anything."

In West Pymble, at the home of Chris and Sandi Murray, a cable snakes across the public footpath, over the lawn and through bushes and trees before being linked to another cable with a splice protected by a plastic bag. Passers-by regularly trip over the cable, yet the Murrays still have no date for when the job will be completed.

"The phone just stopped working in January," Mrs Murray said. "I assumed it was going to be two weeks to a month maybe and then they would come back and fix it." Repeated calls and emails have met a blank wall. "I don't think Telstra has any answers really," she said.

These are just some of more than a dozen cases uncovered in a Herald investigation.

An aged pensioner in Glen Innes says he has had a 20-metre cable strung through a tree and along a fence and gutter for 12 years. A woman on a rural property in Jamberoo fears cows in a nearby paddock will be injured in a hole dug to accommodate a temporary cable. A customer in the Blue Mountains fears he may lose his connection at any moment, despite telling Telstra his wife is seriously ill.

Telstra Group's managing director for networks and services, Michael Rocca, was unwilling to say exactly how many temporary cables were in place around the country but claimed it was less than .04 per cent of the total of about 30 million - about 12,000.

"The percentage of [temporary] cables compared to the millions of cables we have is extremely small," he said, adding that once a complaint was logged, Telstra moved quickly to fix it.

"From time to time … you are going to have some of these temporary cables … We are not perfect - sometimes we do on odd occasion get things wrong - but as you can see from the figures, the overwhelming majority of times we provide service, we do it right for the customer."

Steve Dodd, the NSW branch assistant secretary of the Communications Plumbing and Electrical Union, claimed the problem was widespread because many of Telstra's "conduit workers", who were responsible for burying lines, had been made redundant.

"Now the team leaders have only got technicians who haven't even got a shovel in their bag," he said. "They write out a report saying there is substandard work that needs to be replaced - and that goes into a black hole."

Source

2008-11-13T10:33:00.001+11:00

The Telstra tortoise is now even slower

Telstra workers cry foul over Siebel

TELSTRA's troubled customer management platform Siebel is causing call centre staff to miss their sales targets and union officials are concerned that this could force hundreds of jobs offshore. Call centre workers are also under increasing stress from angry customers, who are annoyed because of delays with the new system.

Some of the problems with the system include the inability to process orders quickly.

The latest call centre problems emerged in a survey of about 200 Telstra call centre workers conducted by the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), after a spate of complaints that Siebel was hampering their work.

The workers blame the errors and delays on insufficient training in using the new system, introduced about three months ago, and having to repeatedly correct order and customer information.

The CPSU said over 90 per cent of respondents blamed errors with the new Siebel platform for increasing call follow-up time and increased length of average handling time for calls.

One Queensland call centre manager told the CPSU that since Siebel was switched on quality of service had dropped from 70 to 10 per cent, equating to an extra 400 customers waiting in the queue at the call centre.

Because some workers have spent extra time fixing errors in the new system they have missed their sales targets, the CPSU said, and as a result their pay has dropped by 20 to 30 per cent. The affected workers are on Australian Workplace Agreements.

The union also said there had been a drop in performance across most customer-sales call centres because of Siebel, and claimed that Telstra had threatened workers in Townsville, Gold Coast and Perth that their facilities would be offshored if this didn’t improve. If that came to fruition, 500 jobs could be sent overseas.

"It’s a threat (Telstra) made that unless the performance of the centre improves the work will be offshored," said CPSU national president Louise Persse. "They’re dealing with angry and sometimes aggressive customers because customers are facing long queues to get through to someone.

"If they create an order for particular work to be done, but there are errors with those orders, that makes them re-work the order.

"People are being put on performance management and their pay is being threatened and they’re not able to meet their targets because the system is problematic," Ms Persse said.

The CPSU has written to government-body ComCare seeking an investigation into the negative occupational health and safety impacts of the new IT system.

The telco’s call centre practices came under the spotlight last year when ABC’s Four Corners reported on a Telstra call centre worker committing suicide because she was allegedly under severe stress from her job.

Source

2008-09-30T11:28:00.003+10:00

Telstra bill revamp stumbles

Any deviation from routine is deadly with Telstra. Big bureaucracies just cannot handle change without major trauma

DEALERS from one of Telstra's largest reseller networks are complaining that the telco's new customer billing platform is only successfully processing 5 per cent of customer migrations to the new system.

The other 95 per cent must be manually processed, claimed a dealer from a Telstra reseller network with more than 100 stores in its footprint.

Whenever a customer is upgraded to Telstra's new Siebel customer billing platform the system "errors out", the dealer said.

The Telstra dealer declined to have its name or the name of the dealer network published for fear Telstra would revoke its dealer licence.

"So far we have found that if a customer's details have been migrated to Siebel, chances are they cannot leave the store with their upgraded contract on their first visit," the dealer said.

"In the meantime the customer is in limbo and can't be upgraded.

"When we finally get the customer unstuck from the system and entered properly, we find that the sale hasn't been credited to the Telstra dealer," the dealer said.

It is understood that more than 9000 Telstra customers are waiting to be moved to the new system as a result of errors in the migration process.

The dealer said one customer had been without a new mobile phone service for almost two months.

Another dealer, which also declined to be named, said some of its customers had been without mobile phone services for four weeks.

"It can take three phone calls a day and sometimes up to 30 working days, for someone at Telstra to sort out the problem and get the customers unstuck from the system," the dealer said.

The high error rate is causing lengthy connection delays for customers and is also hitting dealers where it hurts most -- in their revenue.

On the previous billing system, rebates for phones, sales commissions, and airtime were all triggered for automatic payment, but dealers are saying this is not the case with the new Siebel platform.

"In most cases the correct dealer code is not applied automatically, so the dealer does not get their proper payments, nor do they get the airtime," one dealer said.

"It has left us out of pocket by about $5000 since the system came in.

"Once Telstra moves over the smaller business customers it's just going to snowball, and that's not even taking into account the airtime we are missing."

Telstra dealers receive revenue from airtime commissions.

Airtime is calculated over the life of a customer's contract.

It provides revenue based on a percentage of a customer's phone use. Telstra declined to comment on the progress of its customer migration to the new billing system or whether dealers would be compensated for loss of airtime.

"As we have reiterated a number of times this is a large, complex program and inevitably we are changing the way our front-of-house staff and dealers access the information to better serve customers," a Telstra spokesperson said.

"This necessitates changes in processes and behaviour and these changes take some time to become routine, however we can assure you that our program is on track."

Telstra's migration to the new customer billing platform forms a major part of chief executive Sol Trujillo's $12 billion transformation project, which is aimed at reducing complexity and cost.

The customer billing system project has already missed its self-imposed June 30 deadline.

Source

2008-09-29T17:51:00.002+10:00

Telstra quick to name you as a bad debtor

Post taken from "Not good enough"

We recently had a dispute over a new internet connection with Telstra. It basically didn't work from the word go and they kept not turning up to repair it. We notified them we didn't want the service anymore as they couldnt provide it.

In a nutshell they demanded their money & we refused. We asked for their dispute resolution process which they slowly put us through and wasted a lot of time. We finally got final notices and put our official explanation in as to why we hadn't paid ra ra ra.

We were awaitng a reply. Next thing I get a phone call from our bank saying we have been knocked back for our new home loan due to a default credit note on our credit rating listing. Without notice Telstra had placed us on there.

After frantic calls we got to a senior Telstra person who was great -- removed the debt as he concurred with our explantion. He also directed Dun and Bradstreet to remove us from their listing as we should not have been placed on it.

Sounds like all is well. Wrong. Dun & Bradstreet inform us although the debt was cleared we will remain on their credit check list for 5 years as we are deemed to have had a incident regarding credit.

We believe we haven't been given a fair go and Telstra's processes are to blame. I thought you were innocent until proven guilty.

We also have found with another disputed bill from another supplier B.O.C. industrial gases that they will also put you on the credit list if you refuse to pay their bill for whatever reason.

So it seems a new trend. No process just bang them on the credit list with no independent ruling or arbitration.

Source

Later posts on the thread offer advice on how to correct the situation

2008-09-05T18:05:00.001+10:00

More Telstra/Bigpond arrogance

It used to be routine that when you signed up with an ISP, you got a few extras as well as internet access. In particular you got help and hosting for a homepage plus some webspace for putting up files. More recently, a facility for creating and hosting a blog has become common. Telstra has provided all 3 of those to their users for some time. But no more! They have unilaterally and without notice decided to withdraw all but the blogging facility!

And that facility is a poor one. I used to make some use of it but they often seemed to turn it off at night! Since night-time in Australia is daylight in lots of other places, that was no good to me and I abandoned it.

Sadly, the way they can get away with such contemptuous treatment of their customers is that their many much smaller competitors are pretty bad too. Their competitors are cheaper than Telstra but the service can be even worse than Telstra as far as I can tell. The setup used to be that the little guys competed on price and Telstra competed on quality. Telstra provided the better and more reliable service at a premium price. Now they all seem to be crap. If a quality ISP pops up somewhere I will dump Telstra.

And the ISP part of the Telstra service is high-handed too. My service is a cable one and it was out of action for nearly two days recently. That is a LONG time to fix a cable fault. And enquiring about when it might come good was extremely frustrating. The answer you get on their technical enquiry line is a type of answering machine which assumes that any problem is the fault of the customer, not the fault of Telstra. So they make you go through a whole rigamarole of checking your modem etc and assume at the end of it that you are back on air. There is NO facility to tell them that their fixes did not solve the problem! Amazing.

2008-08-22T14:54:00.001+10:00

What a nightmare!

Since my old Telstra mobile phone has worn out -- no display anymore -- I decided to buy a new one in which I would use my old SIM card.

The new phone however came with a new SIM card bearing $10 worth of credit. So I decided I might as well activate that. I thought that I have done that sort of thing before so it should be easy. I was wrong. The documentation that came with the card gave me two numbers to call: 125 8880 and 125 8888. Neither worked. So I went online to their site (telstraprepaidplus.com) and tried to use their activation service there. After I had entered my details, I got a message saying that they could not activate as they did not recognize my address. I have had that address for some years so what was wrong is beyond me.

So there I was with no means of activating the thing via either phone or internet. So I looked further on the site and after a long search finally found another activation number to call in one of the FAQs: 1258887.

That number worked and after first entering my particulars via voice prompts I was transferred to a live operator who took all the particulars again. He had a heavy accent so I was barely able to understand him but after a LONG rigamarole I got it done. Phew!

There's got to be an easier way.

2008-05-27T11:37:00.001+10:00

Don't believe your internet bill

Companies in the telecommunications business are overcharging customers who spend millions of dollars a year on voice and data services, in some cases by up to 20 per cent of their bill. The overcharging occurs across all the telcos, and mostly arises from contract terms and rates being incorrectly entered or omitted from the system. Customers also incur bogus charges from excess data usage on mobiles or the system charging an older, higher rate once a contract expires.

In most cases, customers are able to claim back the extra amount they've been charged, but this process often takes several months, and usually the telco is forced into action because customers withhold the amount in dispute.

South Western Alliance Rural Health spends $2 million on voice and data services from Telstra, and chief information officer Garry Druitt said it had a rolling amount of between $300,000 and $400,000 that it withheld because it disputed charges. Mr Druitt said the agency had particular problems with Next G services it signed on to at the end of last year, particularly a plan for $49 monthly for 20 hours use, with excess data charges if the 20 hours cap was broken.

"We go under the 20 hours, but somehow they put in a data charge and, one month those data charges amounted to $3000," Mr Druitt said. "This occurred in five accounts in one month. "You can imagine what the bill looked like. "We're finding that occurring whether it's to do with data charges or voice charges. "Every bill has to be scrutinised to ensure the agreed value is correct, but because it's correct one month doesn't mean it's going to be correct the next month. It reverts to an incorrect figure the next month."

Telecommunications consultant, Alex Silber, who audits bills to find incorrect or bogus charges, said he found one in four bills carried an overcharge, but estimated that only 10 per cent of all corporate customers were aware of the problem. The problem affected customers of all telcos. "I had a meeting with Optus last week and they said it doesn't matter what system they put in, most of the errors come from people erroneously or not diligently flagging the service with an appropriate level of charging," Mr Silber said.....

Bakers Delight spends almost $2 million a year on both corporate and franchisees' telco costs, and said its carrier initially dismissed regular complaints that its network speed was too slow. "We just had continual problems with the line and we raised issue after issue and we kept on getting the report back that there's nothing wrong with the service and must it have been that we were putting too much traffic over it, which is why things were running so slow. "In the end we had to get an expert in to do a detailed analysis of the line, and it turns out we were only getting half the bandwidth we were paying for.

"It was rectified fairly quickly, just a software change in the telco's network. My view is that we were only receiving half the service we were paying for, so we were entitled to half the money back, but getting that acknowledgement was very difficult as well."

HumeNET delivers ICT services to hospitals in Victoria's Hume region, and chief information officer Steve Bowmaker said Telstra once charged between $200,000 and $300,000 for services that had already been cancelled. "We both were in agreement well in advance of them finally issuing the credit that they were incorrectly billing us, and it just took us a while for it to be adjusted through their billing system," Mr Bowmaker said.

"We were effectively short-paying them that amount." Mr Bowmaker said Telstra had always been very responsive to disputes over HumeNET's bills, which were about $2 million a year, and there hadn't been any need to instigate formal proceedings against it. He said other rural health agencies had the same problem with Optus, 3 and Virgin.

The agency's Mr Druitt blamed the overcharging on contract details being incorrectly entered into the billing system, which was why the same problem re-emerged in a different form each month. "It's that internal process that reconciles final billing to customer agreements within Telstra. There doesn't seem to be a loop," Mr Druitt said. "We have to send emails to Telstra that define our agreements because Telstra doesn't have the information internally. "We send them the documentation we were promised and they say they'll fix the problems. "It's like having a builder of a house asking you what house you wanted when he's halfway through the project and billing you."

A Telstra spokesman admitted a small number of mistakes occured because of human error, and said its transformation project would reduce these. "There will always be scope for people to make mistakes, but Telstra's transformation is building better systems and providing better training to staff," the spokesman said.

Until the telcos sort out their systems, businesses bear the brunt of their mistakes. SWARH employs two staff to comb its bills, while HumeNET has been monitoring its bills for the past decade. "In the very early days we had an external consultant auditing our accounts just to try to ensure that our customers were getting what they were entitled to," Mr Bowmaker said. "As our contracts have become simpler to interpret we've taken it more on ourselves at the agency level and got people to do spot checks on our accounts to ensure we're being charged appropriately."

Baker's Delight is preparing to renegotiate its telecommunications contract with AAPT next year, and Mr Carrodous said it would seek to build in provisions that accommodated the cost of hiring a consultant to constantly comb through bills. "It adds to the cost of doing business. "We certainly will be looking at that. It's a hidden cost that can then dilute the rate being offered," he said.

More here

2008-05-17T13:08:00.003+10:00

Wrap up -- for now

I reported my conversation with a Telstra staffer on April 9th in which I made the grave error of not having my thoughts fully in order when he called. I forgot to ask him to send me a written confirmation of what he had done to fix my complaint. And when I rang back I could not get on to him to make that request.

I did however manage to get back on to him the next day and he agreed to send out the letter requested. Guess what? No such letter has arrived. Children of the darkness (John 3: 19-20) don't like their deeds to be seen in the light of day and having written confirmation of their deeds out in the open would be too much for them, I guess.

I guess that this is the end of my most recent quarrel with Telstra but I will be keeping an eye out for stories about them that people should know about and will post the stories here.

An amusing footnote to my most recent problem with them is that I appear to have underestimated the time I have had one of their prepaid cards. I thought I bought it early last year but I have looked up the receipt and I actually bought it in 2005!

So I must have still been using my initial payment from 2005 when they cut me off. I use the phone almost entirely to receive calls so that figures. So I guess that they had a reason to be grouchy with me. If they had explained that, I might not have complained. But talking to customers is something that Telstra hates, of course. So all I got was a very vague letter saying that they had a right to do what they did. The vagueness may have been because the "right" was disputable, I think. They never did say where it was in writing. I suspect that they made it up.

Interesting, though, that your initial payment is so privileged. All the "plans" have a maximum one-year duration. The lesson is to make a big payment upfront when you get a new card, I think.

2008-05-04T10:23:00.000+10:00

Telstra's cable TV service shows typical disregard for customers

Why could they not have done this in the early hours of the morning?

FOXTEL customers were left wondering who was the Biggest Loser after the pay-TV operator forced an upgrade of their set-top boxes. The upgrade, which began shortly after 9.12pm yesterday, caused units across the country to shutdown for up to 30 minutes.

The timing coincided with the final episode of Network Ten's reality show The Biggest Loser, which was one of the most watched shows this year. About 1.88 million Australians watched university student Sam Rouen take the title, however, those watching it on Foxtel were left with a blank screen.

The upgrade also affected customers who had scheduled recording programs last night, with many finding their unit displaying a 'failed' message in place of their favourite show. Foxtel has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Source

2008-04-30T13:01:00.000+10:00

The latest Telstra bungle

Just hours after Telstra switched off its CDMA network, farmers, bushfolk and residents of regional Australia are eager to determine whether the Next G network is equal or better than the old service.

Telstra already has heralded the conversion as a success but Don Jackson says many of his neighbours in Osborne St, Scarborough, would disagree. Mr Jackson lives just a few minutes from Redcliffe City, but still needs an expensive external aerial to make a call on his Next G-compatible mobile from the comfort of his lounge. "Scarborough is not exactly an Outback suburb," Mr Jackson, 76, said. "If it's not going to work in the middle of civilisation, I can't see how it's going to work in the back blocks."

Mr Jackson said he bought his Next G-compatible mobile phone a few months ago in anticipation of the changeover. While he conceded the problem existed since he bought his mobile, he said the Next G network was not equal or better to CDMA, as promised by the Rudd Government. He said a Telstra employee showed him a map, indicating he could get reception from his street. He said his partner could get reception from her Optus phone in and outside their home. But because he couldn't, he had to cough up about $200 for an external aerial. He said that if he stood in the middle of his street he could sometimes get reception without the aerial. "Once you get past Oxley Ave, you lose it," he said.

The Courier-Mail rang Telstra on behalf of Mr Jackson and was told his story was "strange" because it would know if there was a blackspot in Osborne St. The spokeswoman said Telstra would send someone out.

About 550km northwest of Scarborough, at Banana, Tim Larsen remains sceptical of the Next G network, although he admitted he had no problem with it yesterday. Mr Larsen, 38, said he was angry at what the change had cost him. His car needs a special kit which has to be installed by a professional. All up, he faces up to $700 in costs. "What's annoying is the cost of the outlay . . . was made by someone else for me," he said.

It's the same sentiment for Mark Driscoll, a cattle farmer on a property about 100km from Moura. "Frustrated, you've got no idea," Mr Driscoll said. "I've never spent as much time on an issue as Telstra in the last three-to-four months." He said he had rang Telstra about 17 times without success to find out how the new service would affect him.

Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce said 25 per cent of the service was not equivalent or better. And Nationals stalwart Ron Boswell said many telco providers, including Optus and Pivotel Globstar, which piggybacked on the CDMA network, were shut out of the market, leaving only Telstra with the infrastructure to service customers.

Telstra said the switch-off at midnight on Monday went to plan without incident. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who approved the transition this month, said Telstra would be forced to reveal its drop-out rates.

Source

2008-04-19T16:52:00.001+10:00

If only Australians were as feisty as Americans

America's Comcast cable company seems to be on a par with Telstra for bad service and arrogance. But some Americans push back. Some excerpts:

Inspired by March Madness, the folks at the Consumerist blog recently set up brackets to determine America’s worst company. The tournament was still going on as this column went to press, but I’m not afraid to predict the winner. It will be Comcast — in a rout.

Sure, you skeptics are thinking, “What about Wal-Mart? Exxon? Halliburton?” I’ll admit that we can’t (yet) connect Comcast to child labor, environmental destruction or Dick Cheney (although clearly you’ve never sat for seven hours on a Saturday waiting for a new DVR). But I’m not alone in my seething rage for the nation’s largest cable company.

The Internet is filled with sites — like ComcastMustDie.com, ComCraptic.com and ComcastSucks.org — dedicated to the company. Comcast customer Brian Finkelstein’s video of one of its technicians sleeping on his couch has been watched more than 1 million times on YouTube.

Then there’s Mona Shaw. This once mild-mannered retired nurse from northern Virginia (a square-dancing Unitarian, no less) got so fed up with Comcast’s lousy customer service that she went down to the local office armed with a claw hammer. Here’s the play-by-by from a Washington Post profile of Shaw:
Shaw storms in the company’s office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!

Shaw was arrested and earned a $345 fine, along with the admiration of millions.

More here

2008-04-16T12:20:00.001+10:00

Merry-go-round of telecom customers proves costly

Whatever it costs the moronic b***s is still not enough in my opinion. That they tolerate the huge turnover rate described below shows what morons they are

CUSTOMER churn costs local businesses $1.5 billion a year, with telecommunications companies the biggest losers. A poll of more than 600 Australian consumers found that over the past 12 months, telephone, mobile phone and broadband companies suffered the most from customer turnover, ahead of electricity providers, banks and insurance firms. Seventy-nine per cent of respondents singled out pricing as the main factor for leaving a company, followed by a lack of incentives to stay loyal (48 per cent).

Poor customer service continued to be the bane of many consumers, with 42 per cent saying their suppliers could not adequately solve their problems, while 20 per cent had issues with inexperienced staff manning their calls.

The survey, commissioned by IT vendor BMC Software, said six out of 10 consumers had changed a supplier in the past year. "This switching merry-go-round is costing Australian business approximately $1.58 billion per annum when the cost of a single customer is multiplied by the average number of churns per year and the adult population (13.2 million)," the survey said. "Furthermore, when the impact of negative word of mouth is taken into account, these costs will rise still further to a conservative estimate of $2.376 billion."

The results do not surprise marketing expert Adrian Payne, a professor of marketing at the University of NSW. Dr Payne said telephone companies had a great deal of difficulty in becoming the "corner-shop corporation". "How can you look, think and feel like a corner shop when you have tens of thousands of customers? This is what they're grappling with," he said.

Organisations with high churn rates should conduct a "defection analysis" to determine the root cause of the loss, rather than ramp up advertising. "It's the leaking bucket syndrome," Dr Payne said. "If they can't do anything about it, they pump money into customer acquisition and there are many problems related to this approach when you don't know why you're losing those customers in the first place."

The study, conducted by Ciao Research, surveyed participants between the ages of 18 and 64 with a yearly income of below $30,000 to over $130,000.

Source

2008-04-11T20:17:00.000+10:00

THE TIO REPLY

In response to my email of 27 March, I got the following reply from the TIO. Below the reply I reproduce my reply to the reply

From: "TIO Investigations Team" response@tio.com.au

Subject: TIO ref: 08/061042

Dear Dr Ray,

Thank you for your email received by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) on 28 March 2008. I am responding to you on the Ombudsman's behalf, in accordance with my responsibilities as Enquiry Manager.

The TIO did receive your letter dated 21 December 2007, however it was mistakenly assumed to be related to your previous Optus complaint. The letter was added to your file, but no further action was taken due to this oversight. I sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

The person who was handling your file has since left the TIO and therefore, the matter was passed on to Lou to action. It is my understanding that you believe Lou has misunderstood the issues of your complaint. I have had an opportunity to read the case notes left by Lou and see no evidence that this was the case. Lou has advised that she contacted you to clarify whether this was a different complaint to that originally lodged on 14 December 2007. Lou is an experienced Enquiry
Officer and while I have no doubt that she was attempting to assist you with your complaint, I do apologise if there was any confusion.

The TIO has since received a letter from the Honourable Kevin Rudd, MP on your behalf. I will be responding to your complaint directly via Mr Rudd's office as requested.

In closing, I regret that you feel that the handling of your complaint was less than satisfactory, however, I trust that this has addressed your concerns and a response to your recent correspondence will be forwarded via Mr Rudd's office.

Yours Sincerely

Tanya Erdos, Enquiry Manager

I replied:

Good to hear from you.

I am still amazed that it took three letters -- all of which were (as I expected) in fact received by the TIO -- to get a response out of the TIO. You've definitely got some dumb bunnies working there. And Lou certainly did everything to reinforce that impression. Please consider using an IQ test to weed out the incompetents.

Telstra have now told me that they will accede to my request

2008-04-09T11:16:00.003+10:00

The Amazing Telstra again

At last it happened! I got to talk to someone at Telstra about my complaint! I have been trying to get my complaint attended to since 24 November, 2007! And I have written many letters about the matter since then.

It was pressure from the TIO that got them to respond. I received a call from a Matthew at Telstra Customer Relations. After a very brief conversation he agreed to my request that Telstra refund the money that they had originally confiscated from my Telstra prepaid mobile phone account. Why could that conversation not have happened months ago? Search me! Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether or not the refunded money DOES turn up in my account.

There is an annoying coda to the matter, however. Just after I had finished speaking to Matthew, it occurred to me that I would like written confirmation of what he had done in response to my complaint. So I tried to ring him back. "Oh Oh!" you will no doubt be saying if you know anything about Telstra. And you would be right.

Matthew had given me a number to call him back: 1800 814 242 plus a reference number for my matter: 1-131690332. So I was not being a total optimist in trying to call him back. But the number turned out to be a general Telstra enquiry number. "OK", you might say. "How does it matter what number you use as long as you get in touch?"

But you don't know Telstra enquiry numbers if you ask that. The message I got when I called was (approximately): "We are at present experiencing a higher volume of calls than usual so you may have to wait some time. If you wait you will be answered in turn. Otherwise please hang up and call back later". I have heard that message so often that I should be able to say it off by heart.

If they are CONSTANTLY experiencing a "too high" volume of calls, don't you think that they could put on more staff so that the delays don't happen? Not Telstra! Anyway, I wasn't prepared to waste part of my day waiting online for these arrogant ignoramuses so I did not manage to place my return call. I will just await developments.

2008-03-28T17:54:00.000+11:00

Email to Katrina Hicks, Constituent Officer for Kevin Rudd

Dear Katrina

Thank you for your efforts on my behalf in stirring the TIO into life.

I finally got a call from someone there yesterday afternoon. But it was a shambles.

They obviously have no respect for your office. They gave the matter over to a young woman ("Lou") who seemed to have a mental age of about 11 and I doubt that she knew or understood anything about my matter.

My complaint was of course about a Telstra mobile phone account but she revealed at one stage that she thought the matter concerned a landline account!

I asked her to hand my matter over to a more senior person but I doubt that she will do that without a nudge. If you have a direct line to the Ombudsman himself, I would be obliged if you would second my request for the matter to be reassigned

Many thanks

(Dr) John Ray

2008-03-27T21:22:00.000+11:00

Email to the TIO of 27 March, 2008

Dear Ombudsman

You seem to have severe staffing issues at the moment.

I sent you a complaint about my Telstra prepaid mobile account on Dec 21, 2007 which received no response

I sent you another copy over a month ago

It got no response

So I wrote to Kevin Rudd

Your staff told Rudd's office that you had received NEITHER of my letters so Rudd's office forwarded you a third copy a day or two ago

Late this afternoon I got a call from a young woman named Lou at your office.

She was so out of the loop that she thought my complaint concerned a landline account.

Is that the standard you expect from your staff?

The woman concerned seemed so densely thick that I must ask you to hand over my matter to a more senior person.

The reference Lou gave me was 08061042

Thanking you
John Ray

2008-03-17T21:28:00.000+11:00

Letter of 15 March, 2008 from Kevin Rudd's office

Our ref: klh:klh/

Dear Dr Ray

Thank you for contacting Kevin with your concerns regarding Telstra pre paid mobile accounts. Kevin has now asked that I make enquiries on your behalf in relation to this matter. Please be assured that I am investigating this matter and will provide you with a detailed response at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime, if you wish to discuss this matter further, or if there are any other Federal Government matters with which Kevin may be of assistance to you, please do not hesitate to contact the Electorate Office on 3899 4031.

Yours sincerely
Katrina Hicks

2008-03-13T00:08:00.000+11:00

Letter of 9 March, 2008

TO:
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd

Dear Mr Rudd,

I have noticed that you have had problems with Telstra. So have I.

Are you aware that if you do not use money in a prepaid mobile phone account within a narrow timeframe, Telstra just confiscate the unused money and refuse to give it back? They did that to me and did it without any notice. One day I just found that my mobile was no longer working even though I had spent only about half the money in the account.

I wrote to Telstra about it but they declined to do anything about it.

I have written to the TIO twice about it but they have just ignored me.

I think legislation may be needed to stop Telstra from continuing this unfair practice.

I enclose a copy of the letter that the TIO ignored twice. I sent the second copy over a month ago but have not even had the courtesy of an acknowledgement.

Yours faithfully,

(Dr) John Ray

2008-03-11T18:10:00.000+11:00

Telstra contemptuous of country Australians

Susan Carlson writes

Not all customers are treated the same! I have been using the net since 1996. During this time I was using a locally based ISP. Why? Because they were reasonably priced, offered service and I very rarely had trouble getting on line!

While I may have changed my towers, hard wear, soft wear and desks, I have always used the same ISP. I like my ISP, because time after time I heard my friends say how hard it is to get on line. Most of them are with Bigpond, or as I like to call it, Big Puddle!

This year I decided to upgrade my net access to broadband. Not because of the large downloads, although that is very attractive for my photographic service, but because my Mum is 86 and hates it when she can’t get through to me. So broadband seems the perfect answer.

Of course that’s perfect for me but not for Telstra. I’m not ‘with them’. And I don’t want to change! So when I asked my ISP about getting broadband, they advised me that I would be paying a fee to Telstra, an increased monthly fee and also buying a new modem. That’s fair enough and so I paid them. I trust them because I’ve done business with them for 12 years!

So why has Telstra knocked back my first application? I don’t owe them money and always pay my phone bill on time? Why did my ISP have to present my application again and why two months later are Telstra still ‘looking into my accessibility’!

Makes you wonder why a friend of mine (in the same phone area) has had broadband for the last few months? OH she’s not only a Telstra customer; she has her email with them!

Source

2008-03-08T00:03:00.000+11:00

More Telstra arrogance

FOUR loyal Telstra customers are considering legal action after the giant telco stripped them of their profitable business phone number and handed it to a competitor just two doors away. The move plunged the Capalaba Raine & Horne real estate business into turmoil with its four owners claiming $312,000 in lost business. It had the "established real estate number" for only six weeks, after a transfer of business from the now liquidated Kanga Cove. "And to think Telstra gave that number – which was well established in the community – to LJ Hooker down the road really rubs salt into the wound," co-owner Margaret Enbom said yesterday.

Although technically a phone number cannot be bought, it is common for it to be transferred with the sale of a business. The value of an established business phone number, particularly in real estate, may surprise those unaccustomed to the phone-reliant industry. "In real estate it's paramount to the value of street position and taking it from a business is tantamount to identity theft," said private accountant Surome Singh, who consulted with the industry before costing the losses for the owners.

Mr Singh said the matter had dragged on since 2004, with Telstra in 2006 offering $50,000 in compensation for "poor delivery of service". Last month, Telstra downgraded its offer to just $5000. Mr Singh said that in May 2007 he calculated a fair settlement of $256,345, which had risen since to about $312,000.

Telstra yesterday denied it had even suspended the number, despite a previous verbal admission it suspended the service because it associated Raine & Horne (incorrectly) with Kanga Cove's incapacity to pay its telephone bills. "Telstra maintain the number was terminated by the administrator when the former business went bankrupt," a spokesman said. "The number was then made available and reissued."

Ms Enbom said her business enjoyed fair trade until the phones were cut, without warning, and then plunged into silent turmoil with the goodwill provided by the established number lost. She derided Telstra for its latest offer and questioned how many other businesses had suffered the same fate.

Source

2008-03-07T13:16:00.001+11:00

Arrogant Telstra loses one

May there be many more like this

TELSTRA'S ownership of the network of copper wires that makes up Australia's fixed-line telephone system has been legally diminished after the High Court unanimously rejected a case by the telco that its constitutional property rights were breached by being forced to allow rivals access to its infrastructure.

Yesterday's ruling found that the former government-owned monopoly's ownership of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) was contingent on the telco providing rivals with access. "Telstra's bundle of rights in respect of the PSTN has always been subject to the rights of its competitors to require access to and use of the assets," the judgment said.

The ruling, which pundits described as Telstra's "own goal", affirms the telecommunications access regime of the Trade Practices Act and bolsters the power of the federal Government before the tender process for the $4.7billion national broadband bid.

Telstra brought the case in January last year, asking the High Court to consider whether its constitutional rights under Section 51 (XXI), that the federal government can only compulsorily acquire "property" on "just terms", were being breached by 11 of its rivals, the commonwealth and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which sets prices for compulsory third-party access to Telstra's network. Telstra argues the access prices set by the ACCC for its opponents are below cost and thus not acquired on just terms. But the judges challenged the scope of Telstra's "property".

"Telstra's argument that there is an acquisition of its property otherwise than on just terms is ... synthetic and unreal because it proceeds from an unstated premise that Telstra has larger and more ample rights in respect of the PSTN than it has," they said. "Telstra's 'bundle of rights' in respect of the assets of the PSTN has never been of the nature and amplitude which its present argument assumes."

Telstra general counsel Will Irving said the case had cost Telstra's shareholders "less than $1 million" but had been worth it.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy backed the decision, which "upheld the validity of the telecommunications access regime in the Trade Practices Act". ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel welcomed it, saying that enforcing the access regime did not amount to acquisition of Telstra's property. The other winners are the G9 group of smaller telcos such as Optus, Primus and Macquarie Telecoms.

Optus's Andrew Sheridan said the judgment sent a "clear message to Telstra that it cannot ride roughshod over the will of parliament". Macquarie Telecom's Matt Healy said Telstra had been "given a harsh history lesson" by the judges, while Primus Telecom CEO Ravi Bhatia said it was "well past time for Telstra to stop wasting money and management bandwidth on misguided and speculative litigation in attempts to crush competition and subvert the law of the land".

Despite the unanimous ruling against Telstra, David Forman, from the Competitive Carriers Coalition, said the industry suspected the telco would continue to launch "serial court actions with little or no merit". "Until Telstra is separated into independent wholesale and retail businesses, it will continue to do everything it can to make it difficult for any other retail telecommunications company to do business," he said. "Telstra has still not won a single case on substantial matters since its management arrived from America in 2005 and imported the litigate-everything strategy, winning only one minor administrative law case against the ACCC."

Source

2008-02-19T13:28:00.002+11:00

You just CANNOT win with Telstra!

They are pigs, apes and monkeys -- or that is the standard of their service.

The first time I learnt that my mobile service had been cut off was when I had arrived at a gated complex and needed to phone the person inside to say that I had arrived. All I got from my phone was a message to say that my service had been "suspended" -- even though I still had plenty of money in my prepaid account. I ended up having to climb over a high fence that night in order to get to my destinmation -- which was not remotely amusing for an old guy like me.

If Telstra were a civilized organization, one might have expected that they would send out (say) a text message advising the customer of a service suspension as soon as the suspension occurred -- but expecting civility of Telstra is pissing into the wind, of course

And it happened again last night. I was delayed in hospital and wanted to advise the person who was to pick me up of that. But all I got was a message saying: "Emergency calls only"! The phone was working again this morning so I rang Telstra to enquire what the hell was going on and was told that they had "routing issues" last night. I have been using phones for around 50 years and had never heard that one before. Service standards have definitely got worse.

Telstra need to recognize that their customers RELY on their phones for many things and build in enough system redundancy to avoid such service failures. I now have my own form of systems redundancy. I have another cellphone from Optus that I can use whenever Telstra let me down. Disgraceful that anybody has to go to such expense, however.

2008-02-05T03:16:00.001+11:00

A suggested improvement for BigBlog

Telstra rarely acknowledge that my suggestions to them are good ones but they do eventually seem to heed what I say to a degree. The fact that this site has a fairly high page-ranking may help.

As I have noted before, things that I have suggested are often implemented by them without notice and without acknowledgement to me. The most pleasing of such events is that they recently seem to have cut right back on the waiting time that one experiences when calling their helpline.

So here is another way that Bigpond could enter the 21st century:

When you log on to your BigBlog site, you have to enter your whole email address plus your password. And you have to do so EVERY time. The service has no "memory". With most sites you just enter the first few letters and the rest is done for you.

Telstra take note. You too could offer an intelligent service!

2008-01-30T13:37:00.001+11:00

This is no surprise at all. Trujillo is a disaster

Telstra using 'plastic bags' to patch lines

THOUSANDS of people are having their phones cut off every time it rains because cost-cutting by Telstra means the lines are no longer waterproof and sometimes protected only by children's lunch bags. The Daily Telegraph has learned the number of faults skyrocketed to more than 5000 problems during the rains last week, compared to an average of 1000 in normal conditions. The problem is so severe that parts of NSW are referred to as "Baghdad" because the plastic bag patch-up technique is so prevalent.

The situation follows massive job cuts as part of the controversial cost-cutting program embarked on by Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo in 2005. The telco, which posted a $3.3 billion profit last year, has slashed thousands of technician jobs in the past 18 months, causing a massive backlog of work and leaving phone lines unprotected from the elements.

The situation hit crisis point last week when Telstra bosses were forced to issue a desperate directive asking technicians to work double time to clear the backlog. One text message obtained by The Daily Telegraph states: "Total volume is 5233 & we are currently in contingency mode. All efforts to complete ALL TOW's (tickets of work - fault reports) will be greatly appreciated."

Workers say Telstra's squeeze on technician numbers over the past 18 months - a cut of 2600 nationwide, including 550 in Sydney - has meant up to 50 lines in each underground footpath box are not properly protected. In many cases technicians, overloaded with the 500 per cent increase in workload, are forced to do hasty patch-up jobs with tape and plastic bags. They then put in a request for an outside contractor to complete the job but often this is not done in time, leaving the lines exposed to water.

The Communications Electrical and Plumbing Union said Telstra's cost-cutting was to blame for a massive spike in faults. "These rising high volumes of faults are caused by Telstra's ongoing program of retrenching skilled communications technicians and major cutbacks to the maintenance of Telstra's copper cable network," assistant secretary Steve Dodd said. "Hundreds of skilled communication technicians have been made redundant in Sydney over the past 18 months following Telstra's CEO Sol Trujillo's announcement in 2005 to reduce its workforce by 12,000." Mr Dodd said there were safety concerns with people's phones being cut off at times of storms, floods and other extreme weather. The CEPU warned people to be prepared for a deterioration of services, including lengthy delays.

Source

2008-01-23T12:25:00.000+11:00

I knew it!

My extremely low expectations of Telstra efficiency -- born of experience -- were justified. Can Telstra get anything right first go? Their offensive and incompetent accounts management continues. After all my run-ins with them, I was sure that I had navigated correctly through their regulations. I FIRST got my prepaid "plan" changed to a "longlife" one and I THEN put another $30 into the account. That should have given me 12 months (until January 2009) to use the money.

But when I checked the accounts-checking line (1258888) I found that I had been given only until March to use the money! So I rang their helpline straight away and was told not to worry. The date would come right in about "48 hours". It didn't. I put the money in on 19th and by today -- 23rd -- the account was still showing on 1258888 as due to cut out in March this year.

So I rang the helpline yet again. Rather to my surprise I got a prompt response. I was prepared for the usual 20 minutes wait before I got to actually talk to someone. So perhaps my nagging about their slow response time did hit a nerve somewhere and they have actually put on adequate helpline staff at long last.

Anyway, the line was atrocious. Once again we have a phone company that cannot keep its own in-house phone lines working well. Amazing! But I guess that my call had to go all the way to India and back so maybe that was a factor. As it was, I could understand only about every second word spoken.

Anyway, with much palaver he did succeed in altering the date to what it should AUTOMATICALLY have been set to. I wonder when the penny will drop at Telstra HQ that doing things manually that should be done automatically is inefficient and costly? Not to mention very irritating to their customers.

2008-01-19T12:17:00.000+11:00

More Telstra boneheadedness

First: The good news. I rang the Telstra helpline (125111) about 11am this morning (Saturday) and got straight through -- instead of the usual 20 minute wait. Something to bear in mind! Saturday must be a good day.

Second: The usual archaic accounting system. I am now at last on a "longlife" plan which allows me to pay in $30 and get a year to use it. So I went in today and paid over my $30. Being a nasty old skeptic, however, (Telstra would make ANYBODY a nasty old skeptic), I immediately rang the account-checking number (1258888) to see if the $30 had gone through. It had. But what had NOT been properly reset was the expiry date. The date given was in March 2008 rather than in January, 2009.

So I rang the polite Indian gentleman on the helpline to ask what was going on. What he told me is that a reset date takes 48 hours to go through so they initially reset it to only two months ahead.

Incredible! If they can reset it at all, why don't they reset it to the correct date? It's very Telstra. I really am beginning to think that it will need legislation to make these bunnies behave with some semblance of civility and intelligence.

2008-01-18T01:09:00.000+11:00

Silly Francis

A letter to Francis Croydon -- PR man for Solomon Trujillo

You are being very stupid by ignoring me. I had to write to the Prime Minister once before to get a Telstra problem sorted out. I am quite prepared to write to Kevin Rudd about your latest pigheadedness -- and that might have more fallout this time than Solomon will be comfortable with.

Yours disgustedly,

Dr John Ray

2008-01-17T01:31:00.000+11:00

My aim

My immediate aim in my present controversy with Telstra is to get them to refund the money that they have purloined from my prepaid mobile phone account.

But I am financially very well-off. I give away money by the thousands frequently. So such a tiny amount of money is of no consequence to me of itself.

What I object to is being treated contemptuously and my underlying aim is to stop people in general from being treated that way. What is an insignificant amount of money to me may be quite important to many others.

So I want to win this one for the impact it will have on Telstra, not for any other reason. I want to civilize them -- vain hope though that probably is.

2008-01-03T12:20:00.001+11:00

The Telstra Tricks

At long last, after numerous phone calls to Telstra and one totally uninformative letter from Telstra Head Office, I think I have figured out the treacherous techniques that Telstra uses to squeeze more money out of their hapless customers who hold prepaid mobile phone accounts.

No doubt one is supposed to figure it all out from the reams of legalese they give you when you sign up but I am no lawyer and nor are 99% of their customers, I am sure. Furthermore, Telstra's own helpline people don't generally seem to be aware of it all either. So how can customers be expected to know it?

First trick: When you buy a prepaid Telstra SIM card, they give you 6 months to use the money on it. But once you have used that money up, you only get one month to use any extra money you put on it unless you specifically request restoration of a six month's leeway. That one got me straight away. Before I knew it, my phone was cut off because I had "used up" my one month after the first recharge that I did -- even though I still had plenty of money in the account.

Second Trick: You have to request a return to the 6 month "plan" BEFORE you put in more money. You cannot do it after you have paid in. I fell for that one too. After my phone was cut off I put in another $20 of credit and rang them immediately thereafter to get my "plan" changed to a 6-monthly one. Both of the two helpline people that I spoke to on the day concerned assured me that all would be hunky dory from that moment on. It might take "2 or 3 days" for the change to show up in the account records but show up it would and that is all there would be to it.

It was only when I rang today (9 days later) and demanded to know WHY no change had showed up in the account records (automatically accessible via no. 1258888) that I was told of Trick no. 2.

I think that these tricks are utterly gross and that my "plan" should be fully changeable at ANY time, WITHOUT my pumping more money in. I further think that money unused due to time restrictions should be refunded to the customer. That would in my view be a minimum standard of civility for Telstra to adopt. But don't hold your breath when you are dealing with a huge and predatory company. I hope however that this blog might serve to forewarn a few of their potential victims.

I think my next step might be to approach the Rudd government and ask them to IMPOSE those minimum standards on Telstra. Rudd and Telstra are at daggers-drawn anyway so Rudd would probably welcome the chance to give Telstra one in the eye.

2008-01-01T12:37:00.000+11:00

Dear Mr McGauchie

I have just sent the following letter to the chairman of Telstra:

I would like to draw your attention to the contemptuous attitude towards customers that characterizes Sol and his staff. It has got so bad that I have started a website devoted to recording my appalling experiences with Telstra/Bigpond. It is here: http://telstra-bigpond.blogspot.com/

The site already has a high Google page-ranking --- as you can see for yourself if you Google (say) the two words:

Trujillo bigpond

My site is the first or second on the list that Google gives you in response to that query. So lots of people will be reading it. You get a mention there too.

Have a read through it (the posts are short) and consider whether or not personal intervention from you is required. Sol is missing in action -- even though I have written to him and his PR assistant (Francis Croydon) many times.

Yours sincerely,

(Dr.) John Ray

2007-12-31T12:28:00.000+11:00

Incredible!

The sheer incompetence of Telstra has to be experienced to be believed. On Christmas eve I went through the mind-numbing experience of using Telstra's phone helpline to get my cellphone "plan" changed over from a monthly one to a six-monthly one.

After FOUR interminable calls to the line, I was told that the change in plan had been made but that it would take "2 or 3" days for it to show up in the account records. So, one week later, I have just phoned the account records line (1258888) and what do I find? NOTHING has been changed!

I realize that Christmas has intervened but what has happened since then? And why does it take ANY time for information to pass from one Telstra computer file to another? It sounds like they have the sort of system we had with mainframe computers in the '60s -- where large spools of magnetic tape has to be manually transferred from one tape reader to another by an operator. That is certainly the level at which Telstra is operating, whether or not that is the actual process.

And, for once, Optus is ahead of them. I also changed the "plan" on my Optus mobile phone and that registered in the accounts department immediately. If Optus can do it, why can Telstra not do it?

And it is not as if this is an immaterial issue. Somebody with plenty of money in his prepaid account could easily have his phone cut off -- as happened to me -- simply because the accounts department has not been told that he now has extra time to spend it.

It sounds like some doddering octogenerian must be in charge of their IT department. NOTHING gets through to them sometimes. I believe that Trujillo is riding for a fall. Telstra has a huge capacity to make customers angry and I would not be surprised if someone turned up to a Telstra AGM some day with a gun. So far Telstra has been able to rely on the easygoing good nature of their Australian customers for that not to happen. But there are now in Australia people from many lands -- some of whom might not be so easygoing. Given my own experiences with Telstra -- having my phone suddenly cut off, for instance -- it is probably lucky that I am one of those cool, calm old Anglo-Saxons who rely on words, not bullets.

I wonder if a letter to Donald McGauchie (chairman of the Telstra board) might do some good towards shaking them up? They sure need it. One step that would help a lot and which he could easily direct a solution to would be to put more staff on the helpline so that the long waits for attention do not occur. The wait is so long sometimes that the automated response warns callers that the wait will be long and advises people to call some other time! If they are aware of such a gross problem, why do they do nothing to solve it? I know from experience that it is a common occurrence and has been going on for a long time. That they let it go on shows great contempt for their customers.

I think that if Telstra's right hand has not managed to talk to its left hand by tomorrow I will write to McGauchie. Phoning them is obviously pointless (and difficult) and I have already written several letters of complaint about my "plan" to Trujillo's office with no result.

2007-12-25T09:33:00.001+11:00

Using the appalling Telstra phone helpline

Since Telstra have so far ignored all my written requests that they move my mobile phone account to a "plan" where I get six months to use whatever money I prepay, I decided that I would have to use their phone system to get the change made.

I had tried once before but was told that I would be on hold for at least 20 minutes before I got an answer to my call so gave up at that point. I figured however that the day before Christmas they might not be so busy as most people would be out shopping etc.

I was SORTA right. The wait per call was only about 10 minutes. But it took me FOUR calls to get the matter sorted out. That added up to a lot of waiting. I foresaw that, however, so simply kept a phone to my ear as I carried on blogging.

The first call was a washout because we had a very scratchy line and I could not make out what the other guy was saying. You want a phone company that cannot keep even its own phone lines working properly? With Telstra, you've got it! So I hang up and start again.

The second call, the speech recognition software sent me to the wrong area. I was supposed to be transferred but nothing happened. Hang up and start again.

The third call I was pretty cheesed off with the tedious and error-prone speech recognition software so in response to every prompt I simply shouted "BUM!". That worked very well. I recommend it. I got put straight into the waiting list. This time when I finally got answered, the thing went well and the requested change was made. Being a skeptic, however, I checked shortly after the call that the change HAD been made -- by dialing the account details line. It had NOT been made.

Fourth call: I asked why the change was not showing and was told that it will show up in 2 or 3 days. Funny computers they have there! Why it's not instantaneous entirely escapes me.

My experience will be recogized as familiar by many Telstra customers.

Conservative economists generally recognize the legitimacy of government controls on oligopolists and I think this is one occasion for it. Telstra needs to be legislated into good behaviour. They know about the waits their customers have to endure but quite obviously use it to drive way people with difficulties and complaints. They will have themselves to thank if they are further regulated.

2007-12-24T10:20:00.001+11:00

Something Telstra has not yet learned

Telstra is a company that follows the old corporate "coverup" and secrecy policy -- as evidenced by their absurd prohibition of their own name on BigBlog sites -- so it is exactly the sort of company which should take heed of the excerpt below -- if Senor Trujillo (their boss) is capable of learning such things

Last year, Kelman was the newly hired CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm that was, as he puts it, "the ugly red-haired child" in the real estate world. Redfin was trying to turn the industry upside down by refunding people two-thirds of the commission that real estate agents normally charge. Customers loved the idea - why the heck did you need to hand over 6 percent of the price of your house, anyway? But agents hated it for destroying their fat margins, so they began blacklisting Redfin, refusing to sell houses to anyone who used the service. Kelman was struggling to close deals for his clients.

His first reaction was to keep the situation quiet and pretend everything was OK. "We were really ashamed that our customers were getting pushed around, so we tried to keep it this dirty little secret," he says. But when months went by without any improvement, he decided to take a different tack.

Kelman set up a Redfin blog and began posting witty screeds about the nasty underbelly of the real estate business. He denounced traditional brokers, accusing them of screwing customers with clubby, closed-door practices. ("If we don't reform ourselves, and take out all the sales baloney, too, people will come to hate real estate agents the way they hate tobacco companies or Big Oil," he wrote.) He publicized Redfin's internal debates, even arguments about the design of its Web site. He mocked himself: One post described how he had sat at a college job fair for hours, waiting in vain for a single student to approach him. ("This was particularly sobering because it meant we had outlosered our neighbor to the right, Ford Motor Company," he wrote.) Meanwhile, in the blog's comments, old-school agents were unleashing hissing attacks on Redfin. Kelman left the critiques ine and lashed right back, in full view of his customers.

His enemies got nervous. All this intestinal spew seemed maso chistic. Worse, it was probably bad for business. Everyone's business.

But customers loved it. More and more signed on to use Redfin, and by the beginning of this year, Kelman and his crew were closing several deals a day. "Instead of discouraging customers, being open about our problems radicalized them," Kelman says. "They rallied and started pulling for us."

Like some crazed convert, he trumpeted his epiphany: "I honestly believe that if Redfin were stripped absolutely bare for all the world to see, naked and humiliated in the sunlight, more people would do business with us." Follow me, he urged.

And many have. Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups - and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he's accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak.

In February, after JetBlue trapped passengers for hours in its storm-grounded planes and canceled 1,100 flights, CEO David Neeleman tried to deflect the blast of bad publicity by using YouTube to air his own blunt mea culpa. Microsoft, once a paragon of buttoned-down control, now posts uncensored internal videos - and encourages its engineers to blog freely about their projects (see page 140). The very process of developing ideas, products, and messages is changing - from musing about it in a room with your top people to throwing it out on the Web and asking the global smartmob for a little help.

More here

2007-12-23T10:09:00.000+11:00

Blogs + Google = publicity

I have been a bit grouchy with Google being slow to archive stuff on occasions but I like their coverage of this site. If you input the two search terms:

Trujillo Bigpond

You get this very blog SECOND on the list that Google gives you! Senor Trujillo may not like what I say about him and his company but he is going to have to deal with the fact that Google-users will be reading it! It's unlikely to bother him in the slightest, however. After getting to be boss of Telstra despite his "problematical" record in the USA, he probably feels invulnerable. He should beware of hubris however. They even got Al Capone eventually.

Just for fun, here is the TOP entry that the same Google search returns (With spelling and punctuation cleaned up):

After being with Bigpond for years -- I've had dailup for years -- it was ridiculous, horrible, slow, downloads at 1-3kbps!

So I wanted to get ADSL, 1.5 mbps sounds great, even better came with 12gb of usage!

It was available at my address, but I inquired about how good wireless was. They were saying how great it was. Then I checked the availability thing again. ADSL wasn't available and wireless appeared on the top of the list. Ridiculous, how ever the horrible staff do this, it is ridiculous. They said it was fully available but then they said that I could only get wireless, and now I am paying $149.95 per month for 1.5mb/384kb with 3gb usage. Thats right, three-gigabytes-of-usage. I cannot survive with 3gb of usage. Even worse, Bigpond is the only ISP with an exchange here. Now I am stuck with a stupid ISP with rip-off plans, slow speeds, faulty usage meter and lousy Bigpond staff.

This is all I am going to say. Don't even think about considering Bigpond. They are the worst ISP. If you are with them, go to a REAL ISP!

Source

I myself have Bigpond cable (after a HUGE battle to get it connected) and find it suits me well enough -- as it should do, given its high price -- but it is true that their helpdesk staff have the usual "Blame the customer" attitude when things go wrong. And every time I have had a problem it has always emerged that it was NOT my fault. I have been writing computer programs for 40 years so I am not easily foxed by anything to do with computers. So I have always had to be very persistent (something I am good at!) in getting Bigpond staff to look into problems. Sometimes I have had to ring back several times until I get a reasonably decent staffer on the other end of the line. One of their helpdesk staff is named "Enoch". Ask for him if you can get him. He is really genuine and DOES kick problems upstairs to where they get fixed.

Update:

I Googled the above post a couple of hours after putting it up and Google already had it! Impressive.

2007-12-22T08:53:00.000+11:00

Casualties of Telstra

Readers might be interested in a little bit of history. Some time in the '90s there was a group called COT ("Casualties of Telstra"). They consisted of businesspeople whose businesses had been severely harmed by the persistent failure of Telstra to provide them with a reliable landline service. Not many people had mobile phones at the time. COT was led by Brisbane high-end restaurateur Anne Garms, whose restaurant often failed to receive the bookings that people tried to phone in.

The COT protest ground on for some years, with Telstra resolutely refusing either to fix the problems or compensate the sufferers. The matters were finally resolved only when a Minister in the Howard government called a conference of all the affected parties -- including Telstra. I understand that everything was ironed out at the conference but I have never heard what the final details of the settlement were.

But that's how bad Telstra gets: You may have to get a top politician to intervene in order to get any semblance of decency and civility from them. And you can guess how rare it is to get that level of assistance. Anne Garms had good political connections or else she might still be whistling Dixie to this day.

There are some links about the appalling behaviour of Telstra in the matter here and here. They even managed to get one complainer committed to a mental institution! Shades of the Soviet union!

Telstra are at the moment at war with the Rudd government over Rudd's plan to expand broadband services so I think if I complained to the government about them, I might get a sympathetic hearing.

2007-12-21T19:12:00.001+11:00

Letter to TIO

TIO
PO Box 276
Collins St W.
Melbourne 8007

Dear Sirs/Mesdames,

Would YOU grumble if your phone company suddenly cut off your phone without warning, explanation or reasonable cause? What if there was plenty of money in the prepaid account concerned but the company decided to just take that money for themselves and give you nothing in return? That's what Telstra did to my mobile phone service no. 0448 285691.

No doubt there is something in the acres of small print that they hit you with that does in their mind permit their execrable behaviour in this matter but the courts have increasingly recognized that the average consumer cannot be expected to hire a lawyer every time he signs something and there are now in many jurisdictions provisions to overturn "unconsciencable" contracts. I hope however that an appeal to you will forestall the need to go to court.

I wrote to Francis Croydon of the Testra CEO's office about the matter on Nov., 27, 2007 and got back a reply dated Nov. 28th in which he said that what Telstra had done was right and proper. Subsequent letters from me have not budged that stand. So I think it is now clearly over to you.

As far as I can gather, the problem arose because I was put on the wrong "plan". My whole reason for getting a prepaid card was to avoid these godforsaken "plans" but it appears that I was put onto one anyway. And the default plan gave me only a short time to use up whatever money I had on the card. There IS apparently a plan that would have allowed me 6 months to use my money but I was not told of it.

Please get them to restore my account, restore my funds and put me on a 6-month plan

2007-12-21T09:24:00.000+11:00

Another Telstra service bombs

News report below. The pic is of Sol Trujillo, Telstra's controversial Mexican boss

Telstra is poised to lose one of its key information technology services contracts with the National Australia Bank preparing to shift its $100-million-a-year desktop management business to IBM.

Unlike Santa's sleigh, Telstra chief Sol Trujillo will have to deal with lighter coffers this Christmas no thanks to NAB. Telstra has struggled for more than a decade in its attempts to move into IT services and with a cloud continuing to hang over its Kaz IT business, the telco's future in the sector is in doubt.

NAB spokeswoman Megan Lane told The Australian: "We have a letter of intent with one of the vendors, even though there are two vendors in place, but have not yet signed a contract." It is understood that the supplier is IBM.

Telstra won contracts from NAB in 2001 and 2002 to provide and manage its telephony and computer desktops. But this time around, the telco has lost out to the US-based software and service behemoth in a two-horse race following a July tender.

More here

2007-12-20T13:14:00.000+11:00

Telstra calls the kettle black

Sounds like some real psychological projection going on in the news report below. Telstra is accusing Optus of being reluctant to connect its cable to large dwellings. I had a HUGE battle to get Telstra to connect its cable to my place. I actually had to write to the Prime Minister before they would do it! Even though their cable was only a couple of yards from my front door! Hard to believe, really.

Telstra and Optus are two very lazy oligopolists and that is all there is to it. It is a definite case of the pot calling the kettle African-American!

Telstra has taken a swipe at its competitor Optus, accusing it of getting a cheap ride on its network instead of investing in its own. The claim comes a day after Optus announced it had upgraded its cable network to 20 megabits per second, and ahead of an anticipated ruling on the price Telstra can charge for access to its copper network - known as unconditioned local loop (ULL).

A spokeswoman from Optus denied the claim, suggesting Telstra is attempting to distract the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding its ULL decision.

Telstra has lodged a request with the ACCC to exempt it from offering Optus access to its ULL network where Optus already has cable. It claims that despite Optus' cable network passing 2.2 million homes, it continues to rely on Telstra's, particularly in multi-dwelling apartments.

"SingTel Optus claims that only 1.4 million homes within its cable footprint are serviceable, which is code meaning they don't want to make the investment to connect nearly 40 per cent of homes that have cable running past their front door," Telstra executive director regulatory, Dr Tony Warren, said. "By comparison, overseas cable networks treat less than eight per cent of their homes passed as unserviceable."

Source

2007-12-19T12:48:00.001+11:00

Optus wins! (This time)

When Telstra abruptly cancelled my mobile phone service, I foresaw a long battle to get it back. So I promptly went out and bought another cellphone attached to Optus -- Australia's second biggest telecoms provider.

I did so with some trepidation, however, as my past experience with Optus has not been good. Optus and Telstra are the only two companies with a nationwide cable network so they tend to function like oligopolists -- i.e. they compete in only limited ways. And if Telstra has low standards of customer service then Optus sees no reason to do better: "Don't rock the boat, old chap, or we might all have to work harder!". Very "Yes Minister"!

Anyway, I struck difficulties with Optus immediately. You can read about it here. I of course wrote letters and filled out online forms but got no helpful response. It now transpires that I was only a week away from getting my Optus service cut off too!

Anyway, just a few hours ago I did get a phone call from a perfectly knowlegeable, intelligible, polite and helpful Optus staffer who seems to have fixed my problems. His call apparently was in response to one of the two online forms I filled out a couple of weeks ago. When you fill out one of the forms it tells you that they will try to respond within two days. But TRY is obviously the weasel word. They don't try too hard.

No further response from Telstra yet, though. It almost takes an atom bomb to move them! I may have to lodge a complaint against them with the TIO (Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman) shortly. I don't intend to give up on them until my old service is restored.

2007-12-18T12:18:00.000+11:00

Asleep at the wheel

TO:
Francis Croydon
CEO's Office
Telstra

Re: mobile service 0448 285691

Francis,

It is now over two weeks since I wrote to your Referral Centre but I have not as yet been favoured with a reply from them. Do you think you could gee them up? I had anticipated that an unsatisfactory reply from them might cause me to apply to the TIO but I had not anticipated that I might have to apply to the TIO just to get any reply at all out of them. Are you sure that is the way Telstra wishes to proceed? Please advise.

Note that I am a TLS shareholder (HIN X00036201355). That is of course no mark of distinction but it should get me into the next AGM. Immediately before the next AGM, therefore, you might wish to brief Mr Trujillo on the questions I might ask. I am sure he would be amazed to hear of the small-mindedness I have encountered. Or perhaps not. I imagine the media might be amused, though.

2007-12-17T10:37:00.001+11:00

A constructive suggestion

I imagine that those at Telstra who have had to deal with me consider me to be something of an enemy. They are dull enough for that. I myself think that I am one of their little helpers, though. I try to get them to improve their procedures and become more user-friendly. I am after all one of their shareholders -- dubious distinction though that is. Being a shareholder could get me into their AGM, though. That would be a ball!

Anyway, here is one more little way that BigBlog could upgrade what it does. It will only bring them into line with all other blogging services that I know of so it is not exactly a huge leap forward but it would help.

When you log on to BigBlog it has no memory. With most internet sites that you visit repeatedly, you just have to enter the first couple of letters of your username and the site immediately completes it. Not on BigBlog, though. You have to enter every last letter of your username and password every time. Quite primitive.

They are obviously bottom-of-the barrel programmers that run BigBlog but what I have just described is so common that it must be a library function by now. All they have to do is look it up.

2007-12-16T12:54:00.000+11:00

An amusing victory

One of the weirder features of Telstra's BigBlog service was that it would not let you mention the name of Telstra itself. Their blogging software actually told you that "Telstra" was a "naughty" word. I kid you not. I had to modify the name as T*lstra to get the blogging software to pass it. I was of course most derisive about that and in my post of 4th (See below) I called them "sick puppies" over it.

It seems that the rhinoceros hide of Telstra does have its vulneralbilities and "sick puppies" was one epithet too far for them. In my last couple of posts on Bigblog, I did not encounter that barrier. I was able to use the unmodified name. They have obviously caved in and modified their software.

Getting intelligence out of them is a huge task but it can be done -- very slowly. Their BigBlog product may even be usable one day.

2007-12-15T14:01:00.000+11:00

Welcome to my new site for exposing the idiocies and arrogance of Australia's major telephone and cable provider

I have previously been blogging about them via their own "Bigblog" facility and from that some readers may vaguely recall something of the execrable services that they provide.

BigBlog was always a primitive affair but I have just found out that it is even more primitive that anyone could have imagined. They turn it off at night! That's right: It is only available during Australian daylight hours! Amazing that Australia's largest provider of internet services cannot keep its own blogs up and running 24 hours a day -- but that is the reality, folks.

Now that I have discovered that, I have of course moved camp and am now blogging here about them. I have already transferred below some of the more recent posts from the BigBlog site.

2007-12-13T00:19:00.000+11:00

Another night failure

It's happened again. I could not access my BigBlog blog late at night. That is SO primitive it is unbelievable. One more such night and I will transfer operations to blogspot. Blogspot is a much more sophisticated and easy-to-use platform anyway. I just thought it was rather neat to use Telstra's own blogging service to post criticisms of them.

And Google scan blogspot sites with amazing speed: They often have a post within an hour or so of it going up. The fact that they own blogspot is obviously relevant.

2007-12-12T23:51:00.000+11:00

Memo to Francis Croydon

Francis. I am putting this memo on the net only as I am pretty sure you will be reading it soon.

I have come across what seems to be yet another colossal piece of Telstra incompetence. I have tried several times to access my BigBlog site late at night and have found that it just will not come up -- even if I wait some time. I have tried accessing it from several points on the net but still with no success.

Is Telstra back in the Menzies era with an assumption that everybody who counts is in bed by 11pm Australian Eastern Time? Surely everyone knows that the internet is a 24 hour affair. It has to be. What is late at night in Australia is early morning in America -- and Americans DO read Australian sites.

So turning off BigBlog late at night is both bizarre and unprecedented in the world of blogging. I am hoping that it is only a temporary aberration, though. Could you get someone at BigBlog to ring me and tell me what the heck is going on?

I have of course saved everything on my BigBlog blog to disk and can easily recreate it on a more mature blogging platform if need be

Cheers

John Ray

2007-12-11T23:53:00.000+11:00

TO: FRANCIS CROYDON, CEO liason, Telstra

Francis

I said something nice about you on my blog yesterday. See here:

http://libertas.bigblog.com.au/

The blog now has quite a few links on the net so will gradually move up the Google page-rankings and thus be read by more and more people. Try googling "Francis Croydon" for instance.

I have not yet had any response from your Referral Centre. You will find a copy of my letter to them in my blog entry of Dec 3rd. You might consider ringing them and encouraging them to see the light. The amount of money involved is tiny and it will cost Telstra more and more in man-hours as this matter goes on. The TIO will be my next port of call if Telstra is pigheaded.

You might want to note my blog entry of Dec 5th. as as example of what I might write to the TIO.

2007-12-10T23:54:00.000+11:00

Francis Croydon apologizes

I must say that I am beginning to get a soft spot for old Francis Croydon. He seems to be the only decent human being in Telstra. He is Telstra's CEO Liaison Officer. I have just received a letter from him dated Dec 6th that reads as follows:

Dear Dr Ray

I refer to your correspondence dated 3 December 2007.

I apologise for providing incorrect details in my last letter.

The correct telephone number for Telstra's Customer Referral Centre is 1300 363 390.

The other two numbers I provided were correct.

Our Mobile consultants are reachable via the 125 111 and my personal telephone number is 02 9329 2274.

2007-12-08T00:22:00.000+11:00

Telstra are liars says court

When you play hardball, as Telstra does, with a whole range of your constituents, including politicians, regulators, the law, competitors, shareholders and even consumers, you face the possibility of an equally harsh response. That is what it received yesterday.

Until now Telstra has displayed aggressive behaviour towards many of these groups. Its historical relationship with the previous Coalition government has been nothing short of toxic, as have its public brawls with the regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Telstra has tried to justify this posture of pushing the bounds of its regulatory and legislative restraints in the name of improving returns for its shareholders. But the concept of this shareholder-centric behaviour blew up a month ago when a majority of investors voted down the pay package for chief executive Sol Trujillo and the board chose to ignore them and push it through regardless.

That doesn't mean Telstra management is not attempting to maximise profits, it just means that shareholders' views run a poor second to management's personal financial prospects. Only time will tell whether keeping the management happy and financially well rewarded was worth the sacrifice.

But yesterday's news was all about the most important Telstra constituents - its customers. And the Federal Court ruled that this group has been dudded. Justice Michelle Gordon delivered a judgment that Telstra had misled consumers about the available coverage of its Next G mobile network. The commission took action against Telstra in September, claiming the company had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct courtesy of claims that the Next G network had coverage "everywhere you need it". (We have all experienced being in a tall building, a lift, or a remote location and losing reception.) In reality, there are plenty of places that the signal cannot be received.

The advertisements that make these claims will probably need to be withdrawn, as the commission will seek injunctions to stop these representations from being made any more. Relief orders have not yet been made. The damage to Telstra will not be financial; it will be to its image among customers.

In terms of commercial gains, the really big actions being fought by Telstra are on the battleground of regulatory pricing. It wins some and it loses some, and there are already plenty clogging the court lists. These decisions potentially make a big difference to Telstra's profits and they are hard-fought, with important commercial outcomes.

But there are other court actions to which Telstra is a party that are considered questionable by investors and by the courts. In October Telstra was spanked for using legal action as a tool to publicise its campaign against regulation - a court ruling denied it the chance to get secret documents from the then communications minister, Helen Coonan. It was all about Coonan's decision to award an Optus consortium a contract to build broadband in the bush. (This has been appealed.)

A recent decision in a class action about Telstra's disclosure presented more of a victory as it was ordered to pay shareholders a mere $5 million against the hundreds of millions sought.

Meanwhile, Telstra has initiated a constitutional challenge to the power of the Government and the commission to regulate the prices it can charge its wholesale customers. The list of actions taken by and against Telstra is long - some are long shots, some are small and some are incidental. But yesterday's judgment is about reputation. Plenty of small and large companies are accused of misleading and deceptive conduct - some inadvertent, some bold and risky.

For Telstra the establishment of the Next G mobile network is the biggest display to date of the achievement of its new management. It's been done ahead of time. It's the big boast and the largest initiative to capture market share in any of Telstra's markets. For those with 3G market coverage issues this news will come as no surprise, but those thinking of signing up or those that are annoyed that the existing CDMA network will be shut down will have some additional ammunition.

Source

2007-12-07T23:55:00.000+11:00

Stealth admissions

When I pay for a service and find it poorly executed I normally write a polite letter to the service provider suggesting changes. Usually, however I get politely told to get lost. What amuses me however is that some months down the track I often note that my suggestion has been adopted -- without notifying me, of course. My usual bank, the Bank of Queensland has been particularly apt at that. I think I have got just about everything I asked for from them -- eventually.

And the same is true of Telstra/Bigpond. When they first made available the service you are now reading -- BigBlog -- it did not even have an option for uploading pre-coded html. If you did upload html, it was reproduced, not rendered. Can you imagine anything more hopeless than that in a blog? I of course complained and got told huffily that they had "no plans" to introduce a html facility. Yet just such a facility popped up earlier this year and has now made it worthwhile for me to use this blog.

The latest innovation that I have noticed is that they now have a blogroll facility of sorts. I wrote a couple of didactic letters to the long-suffering Francis Croydon about that -- which got zero response -- but I noticed recently that they now have a "Favourite links" feature. I have no idea WHEN it popped up but much searching revealed no such thing when I looked originally.

In a recent unanswered letter I also insisted that a blogroll facility had to be on the front page and I now note that the "Favourite links" feature is now to be found there -- as well as being a menu item. It could be however that the front page feature only appeared when I first used the menu item concerned.

The facility is still a poor one as you have to enter links by hand one at a time. On my other blogs I just copy and paste a whole list at a time into a new blogroll. Maybe that facility will silently pop up on BigBlog some time soon as well.

I guess that somewhere deep in the ratlike recesses of their brains, these guys know that I am doing them a big favour by giving them a user's viewpoint and thus enabling them to improve their product but they are never big enough to acknowledge that.

2007-12-05T16:15:00.000+11:00

Would YOU grumble .... ?

Would YOU grumble if your phone company suddenly cut off your phone without warning, explanation or reasonable cause? What if there was plenty of money in the account concerned but the company decided to just take that money for themselves and give you nothing in return? That's what Telstra did to my mobile phone service.

The money is trivial of course. I have already bought myself a new cellphone for $60 and all I really needed was a new sim card. But the inconvenience of finding your phone cut off just when you had a need for it is great. And there is the great bother of giving out the new number to those who may want to contact me.

Telstra still have the arrogance of the government department that they once were.

No doubt there is something in the acres of small print that they hit you with that does in their mind permit their excrable behaviour in this matter but the courts have increasingly recognized that the average consumer cannot be expected to hire a lawyer every time he signs something and there are now in many jurisdictions provisions to overturn "unconsciencable" contracts. There is certainly such a provision in NSW, where Telstra is headquartered.

So this could be an interesting battle. This blog is only one avenue for pursuing the battle. It will cost them heaps in executive time at least if they do not back down promptly.

2007-12-04T16:25:00.000+11:00

Corporate anger avoidance

Telstra generates nationwide anger because of their arrogance and incompetence. So what is their response to that? A healthy organism would try to fix whatever is causing the trouble -- but Telstra is not healthy. What they do instead is take all sorts of steps to block their ears.

Perhaps most amusing is that on their BigBlog blogs, any mention of their name or the name of their Bigpond subsidiary is banned. If I include their full name, the blog post will show an error and will not go up. I have sometimes managed to get away with posting their full name but I have not yet worked out what the loophole is.

Can you imagine a company that does NOT want publicity? It's because Telstra knows how bad that publicity will be that they try to suppress it. Not remotely clever.

And the ostrich philosophy extends right to their letterheads. Note the blowup from one of their letters below. The phone no. there is false. Last time I rang it I got a "wrong number" response. And the letterhead below came from the office of the CEO of the company!

They really are sick puppies.

2007-12-03T16:27:00.000+11:00

Letter to Referral Centre

TO:
Customer Referral Centre
Telstra
LB 5904
Sydney 2001
Re: Mobile no. 0448285691

Dear Sirs/Mesdames,

When I bought the above mobile I put $20 worth of prepaid credit on it and was told I had 6 moths to use it. I used most of the $20 and then on 17.9.07 I put another $20 on it -- taking it as read that I would have another 6 months to use that.

I have just been advised however that I was on the wrong plan to get 6 months use of my second $20 and my service was cut off without warning recently.

I think that is disgraceful as nobody advised me of this strange quirk. Please change my plan retrospectively and restore my service. I am putting this letter on the net so do consider that it might be wise to do the decent thing in this matter.

Yours faithfully,
(Dr) JOHN RAY

2007-12-03T00:24:00.000+11:00

Letter to CEO's office

To:
Francis Croydon
Telstra

Francis

I am very disappointed to see that the legendary Telstra incompetence has spread to you. In your letter of Nov 28, there is one internet link and three phone nos. given. The internet link did not work and the phone nos. 1300363700 and 0293292274 were both responded to as "wrong number".

I also tried to get to the internet link step by step but ended up with an "unable to proceed" message. Please try again to give me fully accurate information. I will be putting both your letter and this one on the internet as my experience of Telstra is now way past a joke.

Yours disgustedly,
Dr John Ray

2007-12-03T00:15:00.000+11:00

The latest missive from Telstra

You can read it here

It did not scan in well so the wording is:

28 November 2007

Dear Dr Ray

I refer to your correspondence dated 24 November 2007.

It is accepted standard within the Telecommunications Industry to provide a limit on credits applied to all pre paid services in order to encourage use of these services.

Information regarding the usage of your Pre Paid Mobile service is easily accessible via Telstra Pre Paid Internet site:

http://www.telstra.com.au/telstraprepaidplus/mypre-paid/online.htm

If you are unable to access the relevant information our Mobile Consultants will assist further. They can be contacted via telephone 125111.

If you remain dissatisfied, the next step is to contact our Customer Referral Centre, where staff will arrange to have your concerns reviewed via our internal complaint process.

The Customer Referral Centre is contactable via telephone 1300 363 700 or by addressing your correspondence to:

The Customer Referral Centre
Telstra
Locked Bag 5904
Sydney NSW 2001.

Regards,
Francis Croydon
CEO Liaison Executive

2007-11-27T00:27:00.000+11:00

"Call back later"

TO:
Francis Croydon
CEO's Office
Telstra
Locked Bag 6595
Sydney, NSW, 2001

Dear Francis

I can't believe it. I TRIED to have my latest problem addressed at a lower level than the CEO's office but all I got when I phoned Telstra was the notorious: "We have more calls than usual. Call back later" message. So what do I do? If the phone book had given the address for the Qld State manager I would have written to him. But all I had available was unanswered phone lines. Do YOU think that is a good thing? Does Mr Trujillo want his office to be the first port of call for complaints? Quite insane.

Anyway here is my problem: I refer to my mobile no. 0448285691. It is a prepaid card and it suddenly went from being in plenty of credit to zero without my using it and without warning. It seems likely that someone has hacked into the number.

I would be obliged to receive a list of all calls since last topup, complete with the charge and duration for each call. I may have to change to another provider if this cannot be resolved

Yours etc
Dr John Ray