Kate (my partner) get’s a letter from telstra saying she owes them $59 for cancelling a service. She is not a customer of there’s nor did she open an account with them… it is clearly a mistake. We call up a month ago .. they say “all is fine throw away the bill it was a mistake” we do. One month later we get an overdue notice. I call them up as kate is tied up at work. I say to them we don’t have an account stop harassing us leave us alone.

They say we can’t do anything as you are not the account holder I reiterate that neither kate or i are a customer therefore are neither account holders and if they simply investigate their own internal systems that they should understand that and be able to fix their own error. I am told that logic has no reason to a telstra phone person and that kate must go out of her way to call and tell them that they have made an error otherwise the debt she does not owe will be sent to a debt collector and she will be listed as a bad debt on the usual industry based credit blacklisting registers. Now that’s quality service ;).

Oh and last saturday i waited all day for a telstra technician who didn’t turn up to connect a phone at my new place even though i’d scheduled it a week in advance and confirmed it with them on the day. He even lied to his bosses and said he’d tried to call, turned up, no one was there and left a letter in the mailbox (considering it’s a block of 58 units i’m not sure where he went or what letterbox he put it in cause it wan’t ours :P). Best thing was that the earliest they could get someone back in was 5 days latter…. even though they screwed up?

.. how’s that for hijacking a blog post?

Some customer service in Australia very good but I think it is the exception.

A few weeks ago I e-mailed a large Australian retailer for help with their products and now I still don’t have a reply. So, why put your e-mail address on your website if you’re going to ignore your customers. …