Poor Customer Service from a Big Aussie Telco

Aussies out there know that Telstra is Australia’s biggest Telecommunications company. Recently their internet division called Bigpond released new cable and ADSL2+ plans which pretty much provided better value for money than the old cable plans.

As an existing customer I wanted to find out if I could upgrade to the new plans. So I used the online chat to a consultant options provided on the new plans landing page. The so called consultant didn’t know the answer to my question so he had to consult with another consultant. (I would have thought that Telstra would have expected that this would be a common question from existing customers). After some chatting and waiting for the consultant to consult with his consultant I was finally told that I wasn’t able to upgrade to the new plans.

I messaged the consultant that I would consider taking my business to TPG who is offering better plans than Telstra for existing customers and the response I got was “Sorry to hear that”. So I called an operator on my Telstra phone line and asked them the same question only to get a completely opposite story, as I was told that it would be available to existing customers also was being implementing in the online customer interface soon so plans could be upgraded by the customer online.

Now from a customers perspective all I really want to do now is dump Telstra including my phone line in favour of TPG because of poor customer service and inaccurate information. This is a great example of why many companies grow very big, become complacent with customers and get overtaken by an upcoming and innovative rivals. Remember when Yahoo was top dog in the search engines and Google came out of nowhere and squashed them and Yahoo are still trying after years to recover market share.

Anyone from Telsta listening???