A Little ‘Charity’ Goes a Long Way
The power of the press! One newspaper article can carry a lot of weight and save a lot of wait. I was most impressed when an Enterprise level marketing lady from Optus called me first thing on Monday morning – from within Australia. Not only did she speak perfect English but her friendly and apologetic attitude instantly told me that it would be a good call. For the purposes of this article let’s both protect her identity and call her something nice like Charity.
Charity had in fact read last Saturday’s Byte Me article about my less than pleasant experiences with Optus and was keen to help me get things sorted. I relayed my appreciation of this offer and enquired on the next step. There was no need for me to stay waiting on the phone listening to music on hold as Charity was going to get the right person to call me straight back.
Only 20 minutes later Charity’s offsider ‘Chad’ called to find out my previous Optus account number and exactly what had happened from my recollection of events. Chad agreed that something had gone wrong with their billing section and was only too keen to get it sorted. He promised to chase it up and call back again.
It was only another 20 minutes into Monday morning and Chad was calling back saying that an early termination fee had been incorrectly applied and that he was now going to apply a credit to bring the account balance back to nil. Chad also went to the trouble of calling off the debt collection wolves and making sure that no black mark would be recorded against my name! So thank-you Charity and Chad!
I wondered if any of this would have been sorted or better still how much time I would have invested on the phone to get the same results without the help of these articles. It does appear that a general rule of thumb exists whereby the bigger the company that you are dealing with the lesser the care factor of their employees and the greater the frustration that is felt.
If you are dealing with a large telco and feel that you have be unfairly charged then you need to try contacting them as I did. If this does not work then remember that there is a Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman that is also setup to deal with large telco’s that may be ignoring you. They have a complaints line that is open from 9am to 5:30pm Monday to Friday and can be contacted on 1800 062 058.
I know that I will get off topic but I have to reiterate from last week that I believe any company operating in Australia, offering services in Australia and billing Australians should not be allowed to have their call centres off shore. We already export our iron ore to then have to buy it back as cars and refrigerators, we export our wool to buy it back as garments, our grains and other primary production foods to buy it back in tins!
So overseas labour is cheaper and we can be offered goods and services from off shore that save a few percentage points – or it better inflates the profits of the large corporations using it. What happens to our balance of payments and foreign debt? Sorry, I forgot! We are currently fixing that problem by selling off Australian assets and little chunks of Australian land – bit by bit.
I see the same trend with Internet based resources and particularly with cloud computing. With faster and larger undersea cables linking Australia to the rest of the world the number of Internet based services that we use which are based off shore is astounding. These trends simply increase our reliance on foreign countries and we slide further toward being a consumption country and become less capable of production.
If you are signing up to cloud storage or cloud computing then find out where the servers are based and make this an important part of your purchase decision.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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