This is another brick-bat for Telstraclear.
I am a big Telstraclear customer. Their products are better than Telecom.
However some of their customer service is variable.
Recently we received a letter from Telstraclear saying they are not currently able to provide internet as fast as they promise so they are heavily discounting the internet service. They give us a $20 credit each month until they can provide the service we pay for. This is excellent customer service given we had not noticed the speed issue and the speed we get is still way faster than Telecom.
However... the other day we lost all Telstraclear services (phone, TV and internet) for over a day. A truck carrying big water tanks severed the main fibre cable in our area. Apparently 5000 customers were affected. I received our bill for the month and their was not discount for this lost day of ALL services. What's more they were charging me for some services I did not use.
So I rang up the helpdesk who removed the extra charges. When I asked about the outage and what they were doing about it, I was told that Telstraclear do not compensate for issues that were outside their control.
This raises an interesting point. For a truck with a load to cut an overhead cable one (or both) of two things must have occured. The truck could have been loaded too high. In this case I am sure Telstraclear will be taking their pound of flesh out of the trucking firm's insurers.
Alternatively the Telstraclear wires may have sagged. In this case it will be Telstraclears issue and something within their control. In fact they will probably be in violation of their resource consent for hanging the wires. If this is the case Telstraclear might be well advised to make a good will discount to its clients to put off someone contacting the council about a breach of their resource consent.
Either way, losing all ones telecommunication services for over a day is not really acceptable now days. A good customer relationship approach would be to recognise this and provide some discount. At $20 for 5000 homes this only comes to $100,000 which in the scheme of things is peanuts.
At the same time some redundancy should be provided for some of the core infrastructure.
So Telstraclear... time to get a bit consistent and provide the service we know you can.
2 comments:
Hi Sym, Onslow Community Church newbie Chris here.
I've had the same on-and-off experiences with TC. I was having drop-outs of 5 minutes every 30 last month, called and got a technician around. Anyway, got a new modem which fixed the issue, but a side issue came up which was that I didn't seem to be getting my full 4mbps speed - it turns out they hadn't switched my service over since the beginning. I probably should have complained and asked for some compensation, but it didn't really worry me too much.
Interesting side story: the technician turned out to be a guy who goes to The Rock church. We talked for about two hours so it probably wasn't a very productive day for him. He told me about a Christian net radio station he's been working on (PulseFM - site's up but I don't think the stream is live right now) so I did him up a new skin since the old one looked a bit dated. There's still some work to do to convert some of the ugly content over, but it's a lot better now.
Hi 'newbie' Chris
You guys are starting to be be regulars. It is good to see. :)
I will have a look at the radio station. Sounds cool. With Life FM not being on the radio in WLG we have to turn to the internet for good Christian radio anyhow.
It is such a shame about Telstraclear as their core product is just miles ahead of Telecom. Silly things like this let them down.
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