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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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