Thursday, May 24, 2012

World's worst telco

I haven't tried every telco in the world, but I would be very, very surprised if there is anyone out there worse than Australia's Telstra. Even AT&T aren't this bad and they are the template for "totally customer un-friendly former monopoly telco". I'm trying to use a Telstra pre-paid mobile phone while I'm in Australia - unfortunately Telstra is the only carrier with coverage at my Mum's house - and at every single step the processes and technology have failed to work as they should. Whatever is the opposite of the Midas Touch, Telstra has it; everything it touches turns to crap.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, you're right... Telstra measure all kinds of metrics and KPIs, but they don't measure customer satisfaction.

A friend of mine had problems setting up a new office, called to complain, and got a follow up call the next day to see if he was satisfied with his initial call. Of course he wasn't, the quality of service didn't improve just because someone called him back. Problems don't disappear just because someone's nice about them. But, somewhere, someone measured that unhappy customers were follow up within 24 hrs, so a box got ticked saying they're doing a good job, and everyone patted themselves on the back. Everyone except the customer.

Doh!

Steamboat Lion said...

An extra data point. I've just noticed that Qantas have switched the provider of free wifi service in their lounges from Telstra to Optus. The reliability and speed is many times better.