Telstra: The Final Letdown?
Big business is such a complex beast of many heads and separate brains. One head speaks to the public, selling wares and providing the Ryan Gosling-esque white toothed grin of confidance. Another is the elusive, complex and often brilliant mastermind, finding solutions and planning new creations. They don’t often speak to each other and this often shows. So continues the drama with Telstra that began months ago.
So there we were last Sunday, heading off to Telstra to put to rest the dramas that have been dogging us for months. We’d received an email from their complaints team that was faintly scented with frustration but came quickly to the point stating that Telstra would replace our phones, we’d receive a goodwill credit or if this was not good enough they’d cancel our contracts. Interestingly the cancellation fees were less than was stated previously by about $200 – but I digress. This was supposed to be the final solution.
On entering the first store we started to feel dread as the staff member had trouble following the months worth of history and then the clincher – he could not find any trail of the final promises that had been made. He went on to say that because the Telstra branded store we were standing in wasn’t owned by Telstra we’d be better served heading over to a Telstra owned store. They advised that these other stores were better placed to deal with issues like ours – so we ambled over to a Telstra owned store which looked remarkably like the one we’d just left.
The second store ended in a predictable carbon copy farce as well. They couldn’t make heads or tails of our story, couldn’t find the details of the latest offer from Telstra complaints and after some arguing among themselves as to what was a blue-tick phone or not we were left confused and really embarrassed. Yet again, after multiple visits to stores, we left angry.
So what’s the issue here?
Like I said, big businesses like Telstra have so many departments, arms, groups, sub-groups, franchises and tech support teams that the consumer is left bewildered, confused, and ultimately willing to give it all up out of sheer frustration. You’d really be hard pressed to prove that this isn’t a deliberate ploy to ward off the irritating customers.
According to their own staff, Telstra owned stores and franchised stores follow different rules. One type can offer discounts, the other just wants simple sales without the problem solving. For anyone, other than the simple walk-in purchaser, this makes a Telstra store visit a treacherous affair and a visit that has potential PR disaster written all over it.
The internal and external communications at Telstra, a communications provider, is also another pitfall the customer must navigate. My last three visits to a Telstra store ended with us feeling embarrassed because the problems we were explaining to the staff appeared as a story of fiction. The staff could’t verify any of the details with their customer database in-store and interestingly none of the staff took the time to even offer to ring complaints on our behalf. As far as external email correspondence goes, replying to emails ends in a dead end. Telstra’s apparently randomised emails addresses, like F1105133@team.telstra.com, appear to be disposable to prevent spam and the like but you are then forced into calling via phone which is a time wasting game.
So now, due to my erratic work life, I’m stuck again. It’s nearly impossible for me to contact the complaints department by phone and as I’d said to them before email is my preferred method of communication. I tried emailing them back as a reply to the email they’d sent me but it’s like dropping a stone down a big black hole – you just don’t know where it’s headed. Could this be another time wasting ploy designed to frustrate the consumer into simply disappearing?
Anyway, in the end I sent my own resolution to Telstra. It was sent to F1105133@team.telstra.com which was where their final resolution had come from. I sure hope they find it otherwise I’m happy to forward it to any email address they nominate.
We’ll keep you posted on how this all turns out.
Cheers.
