Hehe, being led by the dead has to be a better option than what we have now.  Abbott's lot would have to be the most incompetent bunch ever to inhabit the halls of parliament house.  Pretty much every one of them is an imbecile or worse... and Abbott himself struggles to string a few sentences together unless he has somebody to write them for him and he has a teleprompter with big, easy to read letters he can sound out as he goes along.

Yup, give me Gough any day.

Incompetence doesn't even cut it for me... downright thievery is what I call it.  When I moved in with my mother they charged me for both my previous and new phone/internet bundles on the first 2 bills... and that still hasn't been properly corrected 4 months later.  So yeah, I'm thinking a call to the ombudsman might be necessary to get it all sorted out.

might be a good idea if your not getting anywhere talking to them. It shouldn't happen but it does. Even when I worked there I spent probably 50% of my time fixing other peoples screw ups.

poor wintercross, it sounds like you were one of the few customer service people that actually earned the SERVICE part of the title, in my many conversations with the telstra 'support' desk (on behalf of my customers), I would on average get approx 15% that gave me the impression that they WANTED to help solve the problems, the rest seemed to be so thick that they had difficulty even following the support scripts and speaking ENGLISH (most had so thick a indian/pakistani accent that I had great difficulty even guessing what they were trying to say, and if I had not had my decades of experience with the telstra support scripts, I would have had to ask then to connect me with a person that was in australia)

Harpo, the NON-subscriber

@winter Even though i like people that talk the truth, i hope you will not be one employee charged for revealing company secrets in the near future.

@harpo99999: Back when I worked there we didn't have any overseas call centres, however there were a lot of Australian citizen indians/pakastanis working in the call centres.

Since I left they have outsourced call centres to the Philippines I think. I always said when I was there that it would be a bad move to outsource our call centres.

@benmanns: Nah its all good. When I worked for them I never signed an NDA. The only thing I wasn't allowed to do is make 'deals' with competitors or abuse my access to the systems. Nothing about our operational procedures were really secret, apart from things you were not allowed to say while on a call. 

wintercross, I did not think that the philipino's sounded like indians/pakistani's with both the accent AND the very fast speach.

harpo. the NON-subscriber

Dunno, maybe they set up a couple in Pakistan or India? I have been out of the loop for a few years =P

wintercross, it has been over the last few years that the difficulty in understanding the call centre has happened and have found that the philipino call centres are better than the indian/pakistani, but the best is when the call is escalated to the level 3 (apparently aussie)

Harpo, the NON-subscriber

Nowhere does this take into account a rather large group of rural customers that, at least here in farm country, have NO access to cable OR broadband internet. My brother lives less than 5 miles from me and is cursed with dial up. It is all that is available unless he ponies up for satellite.

About 20 bucks a month for the slowest connection I have ever had the misfortune to have to use. It's faster for me to bring his tower and laptop to my house for updates/service.

That's why I only ever ring Telstra during regular office hours - 8.30am to 5.30pm - it doesn't always happen, but you do have a better chance of getting an Aussie answer your call that way.  And yes, the Philipino call centres are better for understanding, and the operators always seem to have a courteous and pleasant manner to go with it as well.

and most (if not all) of the calls on behalf of my customers started during business hours, and yet I had the missfortune to get the bloody indian/pakis better than 60% of the time, the philipinos  about 30% and the tiny remaining percentage is actual aussies in other states (sometimes maddness, sometimes political insanity, and ONCE even in silly knee (after that call I assumed that ALL my good luck had run out and used MAXIMUM paranioa on the journey home after doing everything I could to solve the customer's problems, but nothing happened so must not have been all of my good luck)

harpo the NON-subscriber