Telstra - Bloody Useless

[kadee]

I hate Telstra. I hate them. We are forced to use it at work and whenever there's a need to contact them the task is hot potatoed between the staff. Nobody wants to deal with them.

Today big fool me bought their pre-paid wireless broadband. I have been trying for over 5 hours to get thru to activate the damned thing and cannot get out of the queue. Just now after 47 minutes waiting they picked up the phone. And disconnected me.

GOD I HATE TELSTRA!!!!

[Cas98]

Surprise surprise....

[firefly3]

You really cant expect better from a 6th rate company

[Aussie Taff]

Telstra would have to come somewhere near the top of the hit parade, when it comes to the absence of Customer Service. There just isn't any, the call centre staff just have no answers for any queries, quite often they are very difficult to understand. The whole Customer Help system at Telstra, is designed to not offer help, but just hope you will go away after talking to recorded messages for anything up to half and hour. From what I am told, Optus is only a whisker behind Telstra for their petty hopeless customer service. When is Kevin 07 going to tighten up the way these Telcos operate. They are way beyond what the people expect.

[Telephoneboy]

let e give you some information on telstra - i work for telstra (BUT AM NOT ON HERE AS AN OFFICIAL REP!!!!!!!!)
my dept has hundreds of products - with thousands of variations. i pride myself on my customer service - but i know i will NEVER know everything about everything. i do have to put customers on hold - this is a fact of life. as is getting transferred to other departments - i am trained in land line PSTN services. that is all. anything else will need to go to another dept.
i bust a gut on a daily basis to get work done for a customer so please don't tar all of telstra with the same brush

[mjd26]

The unfortunate problem TelephoneBoy is that the structure of the whole Telstra organisation means that there can be hundreds or even thousands of staff just like you and the whole process will still be terrible.

One of the significant problems is when the different departments seem to be totally incapable of coordinating between themselves and also don't seem to know which other department actually does what thing.

People don't mind if they're put on hold for a little while as a person gathers information, nor do they mind being transfered to another department. Just so long as the information they get after waiting is accurate and when transferred they are transferred to the right department.

All too often within Telstra people are transfered incorrectly a number of times before finally speaking to the correct person, that is a serious failure of the organisation which happens because of their ridiculous structure which is not geared towards high quality customer service.

Nobody would deny that there are indeed people like you who try to do the right thing, but I would be willing to wager that despite all of your best efforts, you would almost definitely over the course of your employ have transferred a person to the wrong department which put them into the hands of someone who didn't care who then treated them as a fool for speaking with the wrong department. You wouldn't have intended to, but because their are so many departments and nobody really knows what each one actually does, you would have done it.

Also:
" i am trained in land line PSTN services."
Would that be;
A. The lodgement of faults thereon?
B. The billing thereof
C. The connection thereof
D. The disconnection thereof
E. The re-connection thereof
F. The relocation thereof?

In your one area of expertise Telstra have several different possible departments you could speak to.

Unfortunately the organisation has already painted itself all over with the brush. The fact that you repaint a little of it sadly does little.