Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When a company makes more than $5 billion profit a year, one would expect that it could provide its customers with good service, but that's not always the case with Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications provider. Contacting Telstra can be difficult. It doesn't provide a physical address for customers to visit. The Telstra website offers no email address. There is no contact address for written inquiries and contact with Telstra is usually through a 1300 or similar number, which most likely will redirect a caller to an offshore call centre. It's a company that seems to avoid face-to-face customer contact. It's the ultimate irony that the company which has become a corporate giant on the claim of 'Putting people and business in touch with one another' makes personal contact with itself so difficult.

Telstra is the single largest source of complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Many of the complaints are associated with the NBN rollout and Telstra's unique relationship with NBN Co. Complaints include: using offshore call centres staffed by people with no local knowledge; generic do-it-yourself instruction sheets given to consumers for installation of equipment such as modems—sometimes with incorrect information; the NBN fibre-to-the-node loss of phone service during power outages; the deliberate manner in which services are packaged to make it impossible for customers to make a like-for-like comparison; and the use of Telstra-specific products with no operating manual.

Today, telecommunication is not a luxury; it's an essential service for homes and businesses. When a problem arises with a telecommunications service, if users are not tech savvy they need to access real people who are familiar with their location and the telecommunications system they rely on. But for Telstra that has become a thing of the past. It seems that the quickest way to get an answer to a Telstra problem is to visit the Telstra CrowdSupport website, a social forum where customers provide support and solutions for each other. Telstra CrowdSupport may be useful, but it also highlights the level of customer dissatisfaction that such a website has become necessary.

The NBN rollout has added to Telstra complaints, in particular the NBN fibre-link bottleneck from the node to the exchange often reducing performance to below existing non-NBN levels. Adding to frustrations, problems are frequently handballed back and forth between Telstra and NBN Co, with both companies now employing spin doctors to mask their poor customer service. My office is regularly contacted about Telstra NBN issues. I quote from a recent email I received about the difficulties a person was having with their new Telstra NBN connection:

Some issues arose which I was able to address but it would have been a lot easier if I had access to the user manual for the modem rather than the generic one page setup guide provided in the box with the modem.

The Gateway modem provided by Telstra is a Sagemcom Model F@st 5355.

This manual is not available on the manufacturer's website so I phoned Sagemcom—they advised me that the Gateway is sold exclusively to Telstra and I must contact Telstra for a User Manual. They gave me the Telstra 1800 number to call.

This led to a 47 minute wait for a reply. When I was finally answered by a call centre in Manila the male operator said there was no manual, then when pressed he said he would speak with the technical support people and he put me on hold.

The end result was I ended up back on the queue for another 10 minutes before being answered by yet another operator and I had to start the whole process over again. This female operator had no idea how to deal with my query and told me to search the web using Google—which I had already done before ringing Telstra. She then said I should see if the Telstra Shop could provide a manual, which I had tried in the past with no success. I asked to speak with her supervisor and was put on hold where I remained for a further 20 minutes before speaking with yet another operator and having to explain the whole story again.

After he consulted with a supervisor he asked for a mobile phone number to call me back within the hour with information.

This did not happen. A total of 1 hour 20 minutes on the phone all spent to no avail.

More recently, I was contacted by a local business, which has been trying to resolve its Telstra NBN switchover issues for six weeks and the problem is still not fixed, causing major disruptions to the business as it impacts on its internet, EFTPOS, security cameras, alarms and telephones. The buck-passing as to whether the fault lay with Telstra or NBN adds to the frustration and difficulty.

Last year, Telstra made $5.85 billion in profit. Its CEOs are paid millions of dollars. Surely, a little of Telstra's profits could be spent to ensure better service is provided to its customers, whose pockets the profits come from.