A LETTER TO BRIAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, TELSTRA DIRECTOR CUSTOMER SERVICE

Dear Brian,

Thanks for the opportunity to be involved in another Telstra Customer Service Survey (and if you wouldn’t mind passing this onto Fiona, Head of Customer Service and Contact Centres, who’s also written to us, extending her hand of friendship).

As I explained in a letter to your colleague Leo (Head of Global Financial Services) in some detail last Saturday, I don’t have a definitive position on “How did we do?” because you still haven’t done anything. The solution to this lingering matter is still hovering menacingly somewhere in cyber space – where it’s been since mid January.

However, I appreciate that Telstra thrives on feedback, so once I arrived at the free-wifi park, I clicked on the latest link you sent, to provide some preliminary observations.

To be honest, I found the initial menu of choices a little prescriptive. “Unlikely to recommend”, for instance (on the far left of the screen) didn’t really cut it. And I wasn’t prepared to glance at the other end of the scale, incase I involuntarily punched the computer screen. As a remedial measure, perhaps you could get your web designer to include some more “descriptive” offerings. For instance “Inconsolably frustrated”, an “unconscionable waste of time”, even “on the verge of committing harikari“. These are inclusions many of your customers might find useful, based on conversations I’ve been having.

As an aside, on the same “Telstra – how did we do?” landing page, I think I might have stumbled on the source of the problem you’ve had activating our “Hottest Home Entertainment Bundle” (HHEB) over the past four and half months,

Your technician’s “tools of trade”… the hammer and wrench, featured above the page link “Problem with your service?” Is that what your gun tech team is using to solve these outages? Haven’t they got anything else? A screwdriver perhaps? Good for getting into the those tight corners?

Since my letter to Leo, Denis, another of your colleagues, has been kind enough to keep me up to speed with progress on our matter, reassuring us for more than a week that it will only be 24 hours before our HHEB is activated.

He’s also told us not to worry about the $650 excess data bill we have racked up on mobile phones, so far in May.

I appreciate these costs are necessary to cover the wages of the International Customer Service Representatives (ICSR) required to take my (countless) calls during this period. (And thanks by the way, for just adding that extra data to our bill, without even asking us if we want it – certainly saves a lot of unnecessary calls)

What I would like to propose, to help us recoup these significant mobile phone expenses, is a commercial arrangement whereby we sell back to Telstra the 999.5GB of data that we haven’t been able to use in May, due to the on-going “paralysis” of our HHEB.

In good faith, I’m prepared to offer this at the discounted rate of $7.50 per 1GB of data (vs the $10 per 1GB you’ve charged me). I see this as only fair, given the time and money Telstra has invested in trying to solve my issue over the past four and a half months.

Furthermore, I’m also willing to wave the cost of the 66 hours I’ve spent on the phone, pestering and causing stress for your ICSRs, I appreciate some of the things I said probably didn’t even sound like English, even to those people who’s native tongue is English

Thanks again Brian for the opportunity to be involved in Telstra’s quest for customer service excellence, and I’m looking forward tomorrow, and Denis’ next daily promise.

In the meantime, please advise which or your six befuddled department heads will be buying back my unused data, so I can prepare the final settlement.

Regards

Wendy

(Again – not my real name, but she doesn’t want to talk to you, and she’s my boss.)