Last Tuesday just after 6pm I got a sales calls from Telstra’s Big Pond trying to sell me a Next G broadband package.

I politely told the saleswoman, Cloe, that I wasn’t a big fan of Telstra because they were not able to sell me a DSL broadband connection, because they don’t have enough copper in the ground in my area. I told her that when they upgrade either the exchange or the copper network I would be interested in receiving a call. In the meantime I already have a Next G connection which I use as a back up when my Optus satellite connection malfunctions. I told her that I thought that in general Telstra was not doing the right thing by its rural subscribers and that she could tell her supervisor that I was not a happy Telstra customer and was unlikely to want to buy anything else from them.

She kept on trying to sell me a Next G package.

So I ended up putting the phone down.

A couple of minutes later the phone rang again. Another Telstra sales person, this times a man. He started on the same script. I told him that I was not interested and that I had already had a call and had already said I wasn’t interested. He kept talking making his sales pitch, shouting at me that I needed Next G. I ended up swearing at him and put the phone down.

Fifteen minutes later and the phone rang again. This time my wife answered the phone. Telstra again. My wife politely told the woman at the other end that we were not interested and we had already been called twice before in the preceding half hour.

By this time I was somewhat irate, so I decided to make a complaint about harassment. I looked in the phone book for a Telstra complaints number. There listed in the white pages in a double page ad was a heading that said, “Complaints”.

And the number listed for Big Pond complaints is 137 663.

So I tried calling it. I got a recorded message telling me that this number functioned during office hours, which concluded at 6pm.

So here is the deal, I thought: Telstra can call me outside of office hours, but I can’t call them to complain outside of office hours. One more thing to complain about.

I didn’t have time to call the following day, but on Thursday I called the complaints number. What did I get? A set of options, none of which was “Complaints”. The closest thing to complaints was “Sales” and since I wanted to complain about sales, I chose the appropriate selection. Unfortunately the person that I reached wasn’t a complaints person, just a sales person (and sounded like she was at a Malaysian call centre, from the accent). So she connected me with someone else. The next person also was not a complaints person, and also sounded like she was at a Malaysian call centre. She told me that I should go to the Big Pond website, because I could send an email from there to “Complaints”.

I told her that I had called the phone number in the phone book that clearly was the advertised methodology for complaining and that since I could only reach sales people, there was a clear intent on the part of Telstra to make all roads lead to sales, so the advertising was false and misleading, and that I would now write to the executive in Telstra to complain.

That is what I am doing now. And I am also blogging about it.

I would like Telstra to:

1)    Stop harassing me with sales calls
2)    Make sure that there is a complaints process for people to complain about its sales people and its tactics
3)    Stop advertising that it has a complaints phone number when it doesn’t
4)    And above all stop trying to move people to Next G in order to avoid a fundamental obligation to provide either copper in the ground and/or the appropriate kit in the exchanges to enable DSL in country areas.

The fact is that Telstra charges a lot more for a Next G connection than it does for a DSL connection. From a Telstra point of view this means that it obviously has a much stronger motivation to invest in sales harassment and getting people to subscribe to an expensive service than to upgrade it infrastructure and sell the same service to houses in the same street at the same price.

I think that the fundamental issue here that Telstra needs to address is this:

Its service obligation as the controller of all the copper in the ground should be to deliver an equal service to all people in the country at an equivalent price.

I would imagine that this is what Senator Conroy wants to achieve through the establishment of the NBN. I heartily endorse this move, but I would, in the mean time, not want to see Telstra get off the hook with respect to what it is currently doing.

I would like to hear from Telstra as to what it intends to do to discipline its sales people to stop harassment too.

I am looking forward to a letter from someone within Telstra…

This entry was posted on July 18, 2009 at 11:56 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet