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The Phone Companies

Posted by: Michael Smith | 24 November, 2008 - 11:50 AM

Most Australians are pretty easy going. It takes a fair bit for most of us to go to the trouble of lodging a complaint about poor service. When was the last time you sent a restaurant meal back?

When you have a problem with a phone company the process to get it solved is pretty time-consuming. First you've got to go to the phone company, go through their process to get the problem solved. If you go through those hoops and you're still not happy, then you can go to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman to try to get their help. That should be the last resort.

So it's jaw-dropping that 150,000 people lodged an official complaint with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman about our phone companies last year. 150,000 people complaining about 268,645 individual customer complaints that the phone companies hadn't fixed.

This industry seems to think it's a law unto itself. And of course with 90% of the $40 billion a year industry's profits, Telstra is the main offender.

One of the blokes I work with, Kevin Turner, has just come back from New Zealand. He took his Telstra wireless broadband connection with him. It worked OK in New Zealand and he used it to download 678 megabytes of data (maybe one or two reasonable sized photos). He "roamed" onto a phone company in New Zealand. That phone company would have charged Telstra no more than it charged a New Zealand local - maybe $10 or $20 absolute tops. But the bill Kevin got from Telstra - $10,000. What a rip-off. Just pure, gouging profit for the monster gorilla Telstra.

Or this. The husband of the Consumer Telecommunications Network CEO bought a mobile phone from Telstra. It was faulty. He returned it to the dealer. Six weeks later the dealer denied it had the phone. Then admitted they'd lost it. Then they tried to sell him a new phone with a new contract, while still charging him under the old contract. After the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman stepped in Telstra promised a new handset. But the customer was billed for it anyway. Which sent him back into the same circle of complaints and no resolution. Months later Telstra found the original faulty phone.

The notion of customer service in the phone companies is a joke. Why do they bother with computer voice systems that say "your call is important to us, please select from the following option." It's total BS. Your call is not important to them unless you're going to buy something. It would be more honest to say "your call is a dead-set pain in the butt to us so we're going to make it so frustrating that hopefully you'll go away."

When the industry is so manifestly not up to fixing its own problems, there has to be a real role for the government to step in and regulate with serious fines for non-compliance.