I am helping my aunt and uncle move from one state to another, and in cancelling a Telstra bundle from May 30, their email got switched off within an hour of that call.
Telstra. Making it easy to hate Telstra. David Thodey, former CEO, spent millions upon millions of dollars in improving tech support.
Andrew Penn seems to be undoing all of Thodey’s good work.
I was still on hold with Telstra as I typed this article, but only just got off the line. Earlier today, I called Telstra on a three way call. Myself, my aunt and Telstra.
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My aunt came to Australia about 10 years ago and while she speaks English, it is her second language, so I’m often the translator and tech help.
Calling Telstra to cancel the ‘Telstra Medium Bundle’ for Internet and home phone was easy enough. My relatives are on a contract until 19 August, 2018, and their payout fee to cancel the contract early was $223.55.
The service is to continue until 5pm on May 30, 2017, as they are leaving on May 31, 2017.
On top of this fee is the pro-rata amount for the month.
My relatives aren’t switched over to Telstra at their new address because they aren’t connecting to the Internet immediately while they are there. They will get reconnected in a few months as they will be travelling back and forth between Adelaide and Sydney and have access to Internet on their smartphones.
Their usage is low - they are not super heavy users, so they can get away with this for a while.
One of the questions we asked before disconnected was whether their email address would continue working, and if not, what the price was to keep in going, as friends have done when moving from Telstra to some other service.
Well, there was an assurance that my aunt’s bigpond.com email address would continue being active for the next twelve months, after which a $79 yearly fee would apply should she want to continue using it.
As you can imagine, having access to email at this time is important, and we were relieved to hear this.
My relatives are dealing with various authorities to have new services switched on. They’re dealing with their accountant, employers and more.
Having an email address is important, especially one that has been in use for many, many years!
So, it turns out that around an hour after we got off the line with Telstra, my aunt tells me her accountant has called her to say that emails are bouncing back.
I also emailed my aunt, only to see that Telstra’s bigpond.com server was replying: “Your message wasn't delivered to ___@bigpond.com because the address couldn't be found. Check for typos or unnecessary spaces and try again.
“The response was:
“550 <____@bigpond.com>; recipient rejected. IB603a”
What? WTF? Telstra has cut off my aunt’s only email address, one she has had for years with Telstra, after telling us that she will have access to it free for the next 12 months?
If this email was going to be cut off for any length of time, isn’t this something Telstra should have told us before allowing us to cancel? We told Telstra the service was being cut because of a move.
We would have delayed the cut-off to a week or two in the future had we known this would disrupt her email address, but there was no mention of this on the phone!
On top of that, my uncle is continuing his mobile service with Telstra, so they are not stopping being Telstra customers.
So, we call Telstra back and ask what the heck is going on. A very nice lady proceeds to put us on hold to find out what is going on. My relatives are lucky that I am able to help them, bceause non-technical people would have greater difficulty understanding WTF Tesltra has just done to them and why their email has died all of a sudden.
We are told that it will take up to 24 hours for the email to be restored. I explain, calmly at first but quite angrily soon enough that this is simply completely unacceptable and the email needs to be switched back on immediately!! How hard could it be to flick a switch, and if it is going to take 24 hours, what kind of Mickey Mouse operation is Telstra running?
I also tell the tech support person that Telstra managers should listen to my call as I get very, very annoyed at this ridiculous turn of events, and to feel free to broadcast it across Australia, as I engage in a bit of incredulous yelling that Telstra could do this to my relatives, because people are damn well fed up with Telstra screwing them around!!
My aunt and uncle’s email address shouldn’t be switched off for 5 minutes, let alone up to 24 hours.
I’m still on hold now, waiting to speak to a manager, although I was told that the manager would tell me the same thing.
Well, Telstra, is just isn’t good enough. If you are going to switch off someone’s email, after they have specifically checked that it would continue, and you don’t give them ANY notice that this is happening, then this is truly appalling and absolutely disgusting customer service.
I am demanding that my relatives get compensation for stuffing them around - they need to sign documents and email them now. They are waiting on documents from their accountant now.
They have used the same email address for years and while I will move them to Gmail or something else, they have been very happy customers of Telstra for years.
If this truly is going to take more than 24 hours, then I will set up a different email address for them, but this simply should not have happened in the first place.
However, Telstra clearly thinks it is ok to stuff people’s lives around by frivolously cancelling email addresses without telling the customer. It isn’t!
Telstra needs to pay for this mistake. It needs to learn that its customers are the most important people - without customers, Telstra doesn’t have a business.
Call this a rant if you want, but this has cost me a lot of time today, and my relatives. It has caused angst and it is all because some process at Telstra, or some person with more button pressing ability than sense, has decided an address needs to be disconnected, without notice.
It’s just not good enough that in 2017, people can continue being mistreated by their telecommunications companies.
If this is the future, it's going to be one heck of a dystopian hell, and artificial intelligence is just going to make it worse.