It's 1999. Two men come to my door in sharp suits and talk their way into my house. They want to sell me a product so revolutionary it will change my life. It costs twice what everyone else is paying for a similar product but in the long run, they promise me, this will be higher, faster, stronger.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
A year out from the Sydney Olympics and the sporting analogy gets me. I sign up.
This is a column about a company that has a product I use every single day of my life, and most minutes of my life.
If you are a Telstra shareholder, you may be thrilled to know that complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman have fallen dramatically over the past 18 months.
Complaints – as a proportion of telecommunication providers' services in operation – were almost 13 per cent lower in the December quarter 2015 and 27 per cent lower compared to the same time the previous year, according to the ombudsman's Complaints in Context report released on Monday.
If you are a Telstra customer, you will know the truth is different. Most of us with a problem never get as far as escalating our complaints to the highest level. Not because we don't want to, but because we just don't have time.
The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network's chief executive, Teresa Corbin, says those numbers bear little relation to those of us who actually have complaints about our telcos. A survey commissioned last year, run by Galaxy Research with 1100 respondents representative of the Australian population, found nearly half of us had problems with our phone or internet provider in the past year; and one-third complained to the provider. A tiny minority escalated complaints to the ombudsman. Of the rest, about one-third said it was too hard to escalate it; and 15 per cent said they'd never heard of the ombudsman.
Corbin calls it complaint fatigue. She says fewer of us want to escalate our problems because we fear reporting it to the ombudsman "will be hard. Or maybe we just don't have the time".
And as she points out, the real problem is that telcos don't need to report the number of complaints they get directly from consumers. Those numbers would give us real insight into how telcos treat their customers.
The consumer action network has called for the release of the numbers of complaints to be mandatory. And I'm sure Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and the rest will fight to ensure that never happens.
I am, by and large, an unhappy Telstra customer. In 1999, when I signed up for that cable connection from the two smart young men in smart young suits, it cost a bomb but the internet access I had was over a phone line and I could hear my life wasting away listening to that strange internet thrum. Wahwahwahwahwah. But I knew that my life would soon run on the internet.
Yet the way Telstra behaves towards its customers is a disgrace, even though its services cost more – much more – than other telcos. It's the main provider of these services in Australia – and many of these services save lives and have the ability to protect our safety and our health. Yet dealing with this company is more disconnected than ever before. I spend $6000 a year on a handful of mobile phones, a landline and an internet connection that is meant to deliver 38Mbps but usually delivers somewhere between half and 20 per cent of that speed.
We are urged to deal with our complaints online yet, when we log on, there are 114 people in the queue before us. We are told to ask Telstra on Twitter but the social media operators of that account can't actually help us with anything specific. We are told they will ring back on a certain day at a certain time. They rarely do.
The people who deal with me in the call centres are always from the Philippines. Without question, they are unfailingly polite. Yet they can't fix my problem and I can't complain about them because I know they are being measured every single time – with net promoter scores – through an online survey I am meant to fill out. They conclude every call with this question: "Can I count on you?" It's meant to ensure that I fill out the survey and I don't want to punish them for the sins of their employer. Their English is perfect but they don't speak angry; and many Telstra customers are angry.
Again, there are two young men at my door in 2016. They are technicians from Telstra. They say my line is OK but I would do better if I had another connection down the back of my house.
They charge me $408, which I must pay on the spot, but there is only a slight improvement. When my internet dies, I use my wildly expensive mobile internet to get access to a service that should be universal, cheap and fast.
If my electricity provider failed to provide, all hell would break loose. There would be reports on my local ABC. I would get a leaflet under my front door within an hour of the outage. It would often make the home page of my preferred news site. My favourite ever outage was a breakdown in the water supply. The provider treated it like a national emergency and its staff organised contingent water supply with buckets – and assistance if you had trouble getting that water to your house.
Water and electricity are defined as essential services. But the internet is not. Explain to me why that is.
Twitter: @JennaPrice Facebook: JennaPriceJournalist
