4 Wise Monkeys

Telstra vs Oxygen 8 – a PR exercise?

Telstra is obviously continuing to attempt to polish their public image and make a PR victory out of their own failures.

As you know, we’re more than happy to out dodgy premium sms scams, but one thing we can’t agree with (particularly in today’s harsh economic climate) is the ruination of a company for purely political gain. What’s truly sad is that the media have also decided that there’s nothing to be gained by fair and unbiased reporting.

In this article in last month’s Australian, reporter Andrew Colley provides us with a positively gleeful account of Telstra’s harassment of aggregator Oxygen8.

Telstra’s reason? A continued high level of complaints, something which we know to be farcical and a scapegoat for their own disastrously poor customer service.

We have since undertaken a little research and will continue to do so. We were interested in both sides of the story and – through our contacts – found out the following:

RESEARCH

(1) Obviously, Telstra is responsible for the biggest chunk of complaints, completely out of scope with their market share in the Premium SMS market.

Talking to 4 aggregators, Telstra’s share of the premium market in the Month of March was 16%.

2) Complaint figures: Now this is the interesting part – the TIO report actually assigns a much higher percentage of complaints to Telstra than their market share:

As is plain from the above chart, Telstra’s share of complaints is vastly outweighed by their market share.

As is plain from the above chart, Telstra’s share of complaints is vastly outweighed by their market share.

(3) The court judgement dated 29 April 2009 includes a few statements that we wanted to know more about. In particular:

• On page 5, paragraph 18, it states that Telstra maintains that there were 139 escalated complaints in December 2008 and 123 in January 2009. The Applicant (Oxygen8) calculates that number at 3. This is a significant difference.We spoke to our aggregator contacts and were advised that generally, Telstra counts “internal referrals” as escalated complaints – meaning customers call Telstra and end up there, as they are NOT given the service providers 1300 number to sort their issues out.

This means that a first complaint at Telstra is counted as an escalated complaint. This does not sound very reasonable, as a complaint to our information must only be counted as “escalated” if the party who the customer complains about fails to sort out the issue (at least this is the procedure the TIO grants the carriers, and Optus and Vodafone do actually grant their aggregator partners).

With Telstra, an “internal referral” appears to be sufficient, which makes the number of “escalated complaints” subject to Telstra’s creativity.

We tried to reach Telstra to find out more about this “internal referral” process but our requests remained unheard.

• On page 4, paragraph 16, the Judgment quotes a Telstra letter dated 24 December 2007:

“61% of complainants did not request the content of a service provided”

This quote is then directly taken up by “The Australian” and is presented as a fact in the article.

We researched a few figures, most of them can be found in the TIO report on

http://www.tio.com.au/publications/annual_reports/ar2008/annual_2008_17.html

Some recent TIO data proves the figure of 61% wrong:

… And now compared to other areas of the Telecommunications industry:

DEVELOPMENT

We were made aware that a new code for Premium Services provides a great deal of consumer protection for premium services.

We say: It’s about time, and it’s good.

Major changes include a so-called double opt-in, meaning customers who request a service by sending a message into a shortcode MUST reconfirm their request. That is you’ll receive a message which MUST inform you about:

• cost and frequency of the messages you will receive
• customer care helpline
• Opt out information

Then it asks you to send ANOTHER message to confirm you’re ok with this.

Then – and ONLY then – can you be billed for a service.

IF ANY OF THE ABOVE HAS NOT BEEN FOLLOWED AFTER 1 JULY THIS YEAR, YOU CAN CLAIM YOUR MONEY BACK. If they don’t give it to you voluntarily, you can get it enforced by ACMA and the service provider will be in trouble.

NEXT QUESTION THOUGH:

Who helps you with the much bigger issues (according to the TIO report) like Telstra’s customer service, billing issues, faults, contracts etc ?

TELSTRA’S OWN FAILURES

We refer to a very good example, representative of what (according to the figures) must be the typical Telstra customer experience, as described in The Australian, Page 29 (Sat 25 Oct 2008)

“Welcome to Telstra. In just a few words, please tell us the reason for your call. You have been placed in a queue. Longer than normal delays will occur.

I’ve been trying to get hooked up since August. It took several weeks and hissy fits to get a home phone connected, only to be cut off twice in error. No such efficiency with my old number: I’ve been billed for calls made by someone else after Telstra failed, or forgot, to disconnect the old phone. Now, having signed a contract for a mobile phone (yep, slow learner), I’m still waiting for it to function two weeks later. Computer glitch, supposedly.
During one of my many rants to a service call-centre, I threatened to lodge a complaint with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. “You can do what you like, luv,” the bloke drawled down the line. “But the ombudsman isn’t going to get your phone working.”

We’ll see how shutting down one aggregator will help with that.

Telstra is scapegoating Oxygen8 (and has their eyes set on at least two other aggregators) to take the blame for their own woefully deficient customer service record. In this way, they deflect blame from themselves while simultaneously appearing to be the good-guys, a corporate Senator Conroy wannabe: ‘tough on whatever is politically expedient’.

CONCLUSION

Long story short – he who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones. Comments welcome.

Tagged Aggregators, Carriers, Featured, Phone, SMS, Telcos, Telstra, Telstra Mobile, Telstra Scams | | 05.04.2009 at 1:51 pm