04

May

2008

How not to run an IT business

I became a Telstra customer late last year, purchasing one of their wireless broadband products.

Now, I've never been a Telstra fan (so there is my bias right up front), but I chose their product because it seemed to be the only one I could find at that time that worked on the Mac.  And once it was installed properly it worked well. The data download was blindingly fast, and it was pretty useful having web access everywhere.

I won't go into the tech support they provided during the setup phase. Suffice to say I ended up passing their tech support people some useful info rather than the other way around. I got it working by myself, and so as long as you weren't relying on Telstra for any sort of support or service it was a pretty good product.

Unfortunately about a month ago I lost the modem, so I had to contact Telstra again to order a new one as well as change my subscription level.  It was a journey into the belly of the beast...

Attempt 1

I called the contact number on the bill I received and straight away found myself in Telstra's automated phone system. This relied on voice recognition technology to determine what I wanted from Telstra. In practice this meant that I needed to know the key terms or phrases that the system was programmed to recognise. At no time was I told what these key words were. The end result was that I couldn't quite work out whether I was a drooling idiot, or whether Telstra's 'Front of House' was. Either way I ended up feeling insulted.  The final straw was realising that at the end of that whole process I had dropped out of some sort of queue and was lost in phone space. Twenty minutes wasted!

I went to the website and found their support contact form. It kindly told me that completing the form was a 3 stage process (good) but then broke on the last of the 3 stages (#$*@% bad!).

So I had been insulted, ignored and forced to try a second strategy, which ignored me as well.  If this had been a retail store I would never come back!

Unfortunately I had signed an ongoing contract so I had no other choice.

Attempt 2

Last week I made another foray to try and solve the dilemma.  Armed with a phone headset, and possibly a better understanding of their "user friendly" phone system I dealt with the computer pretending to be a person much better.  The phone queues were shorter too. I spoke to tech support first, and was forwarded quite efficiently to sales.

Unfortunately they couldn't find my account. I gave them every code, number, address and contact name I could find on the bill they sent me, but it was to no avail.  They put me on hold while they chatted to experts, but still no luck. This meant that:

  • I couldn't order a new modem
  • I couldn't change my account level
  • I couldn't leave a trouble ticket (there being no account to attach it to).

They didn't offer a solution to fix this problem. They didn't promise to call me back. They didn't offer any sort of reparations for the damage and frustration they had caused. They didn't offer to put me through to a supervisor.

Telstra is rubbish

No business should offer service like this - in either its human or IT interactions with its customers. Only bloated monopolistic dinosaurs like Telstra can hope to get away with it.

What I did to solve the problem.

I proposed the following solution to the Telstra phone operator. I would ignore the bills they no doubt would continue to send me automatically, and they could continue to ignore my service requests, and to lose my account. Surprisingly the phone operator agreed to this without offering an alternative approach.

I then went out and bought another service from one of their competitors. I got 5 times the monthly download for  less than half the price. The slight reduction in  coverage had no affect on me, and the slight reduction in download speed was  easily offset by the price difference and the pleasure of giving Telstra the finger.

Service, service, service

It doesn't matter whether you are dealing with customers face to face, or through an electronic system - you have to treat them the same way - with dignity. Some businesses think that IT is an excuse to abuse people. Technological limitations must be worked around, not used as escape clauses.

Care for your customers, and show them respect

Don't be rude to customers. Don't treat them like idiots. Don't leave them in the hands of idiots. All this tells them that they don't matter to you.

Don't pretend to care

Sometimes it is too expensive to provide a high level of care. Automation is required.  When this is the case be upfront about it, explain the situation.  Don't install an automatic system that pretends to provide the care that you can't or won't provide. That's a lie, and your customers will know straight away. Until automated systems can genuinely pass the Turing Test you are just demonstrating your dishonesty and disrespect.

We, your customers, will hate you for it.

Don't break promises

Every time a process fails, or a hyperlink breaks you have broken a promise that you have made to a customer. That would be terrible if done face to face.  Its still terrible when it happens online.

Promises get broken. Things go wrong with automated systems. When they do - fix them - quickly. Apologise to affected customers. Send them gifts or added value to make up for the inconvenience.

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