Those of you who live in the city and are able to get broadband via cable or via ADSL with all you can eat plans.... you don't know how lucky you are!

Here in the Australian bush - not that where I live is bush really - its just a place where Telstra was stingy on putting copper in the ground, so there is no ADSL available...

Here, in order to get half decent service, we have two options - (1) Telstra's Next G service, where to get a decent price and a half decent service you have to sign up for several years or (2) A satellite service using the Optus bird (You can get one a plan from one of the Optus Satellite resellers, but from my experience they have rather dodgy service people who can't tell you much without putting in a call to Optus. So that leaves you with Optus itself. The plans are expensive, but you get reasonable service up to a point.

The big problem comes when you buy a shaped plan, as I have, and the only email address that Optus will send an alert to is the email address that they allocate to you.

Now I don't know about you, but I already have three email addresses and I don't need another one. So I have asked on more than one occasion if they would please send me the alert to tell me that I am nearing the limit of my plan to the main email address that I use. On several occasions I have been told that was fine. But I never ever had any email from Optus to tell me that they were about to choke my service down to a crawl (and when you are on a slow satellite link that is S L O W)..

...that is up until this morning. I called the help desk to ask if I could move to a more expensive plan and increase the amount of data before hitting the wall. That was no problem and the customer service person was really good. But then I asked why I hadn't been receiving my bills by email and an alert to advise that the service was about to croak. The response was, "You have to use the Optus email address. The system doesn't allow for any other email address to be used".

I said to the customer service person, "so here we have a communications company that is worth billions and they can't afford to upgrade their system... and what about the concept that the customer is always right..." My friendly customer service person told me that I must be joking. That concept went out the door years ago".

Well at least he was honest!

So I asked him to give me the CEO's email so that I could alert him to the fact that there was a problem in their system (not to mention a problem in their culture with regard to customer service as taught from on high in the organization). He couldn't help me. It wasn't available to him.

So Mr Paul O'Sullivan, CEO of Optus, I assume that you have people monitoring blogs for brand reputation. Here is my challenge to you. You need to fix this problem of not being able to alert a customer unless the customer uses an email address mandated by you. You need to fix it, because unless you can communicate with me as a customer, how do I know what is going on with my account? I have never received a bill or a statement from you as to my account, because I have trusted you to debit my credit card. But now I realize that I have granted you too much.

I look forward to receiving a communication from someone in your organization to tell me that you, as a CEO, are listening to your customers. If not, I assume that I will have to have a whinge to the ombudsman or ATUG or someone like that. Happy to do that too if it will help elicit change in your organization.

I am a believer that the customer really is in charge, and I would have thought that the second largest telco in this country would have already gotten that...