Like the proverbial builder's house, TUANZ Board member Jane Hindle has never bothered to get around to sorting out a better deal on her own communications package. The
recent increase from Telecom was the final catalyst to do some analysis and get her own house in order. The results are far from encouraging.
Jane tells me she checked out the various plans on offer. Being a customer of Vodafone, TelstraClear and Telecom already, getting a better deal from one of them provided a simpler option than going to yet another provider as she already had an account with them. After some research, the
PDQ package from TelstraClear with a homeline, 256/128K internet and toll calling seemed good value, about $20 less per month than her Telecom account and easy for her to sign up online as an existing account holder, which she did on Wednesday. Being busy, she promptly forgot about it the following day and headed down to Auckland for a family wedding the day after, on Friday morning.
On her return home late Saturday night her Jetstream router had a red light showing. After the usual self checks and resets she couldn't get the router going at all. About 20 minutes later it dawned on her that perhaps this might be something to do with the request for service from TelstraClear. Eventually she located a modem cable and plugged her laptop into the phone line and managed to dial up, overjoyed (not) to find a number of large reports and some photographs had been sent during Friday.
But no communication regarding her service order from TelstraClear. No acknowledgement of order, no service order number, no date for transfer. Given that her husband hadn't cancelled the Xtra account, which was in his name, surely Telecom couldn't have arbitarily cut off just the Jetstream at the exchange. Tired and extremely grumpy she decided to wait until Sunday morning to sort it out.
Checking Xtra's usage and account information, the account didn't exist any more and again no notification from Telecom of the disconnection of the email account. Jane phoned TelstraClear who advised yes there was a service order in process but although it had been initiated and sent through to Telecom, they had received no advice as to whether it had been accepted or not, and certainly not that they had already disconnected an existing service. (What happened to the TCF's excellent
Customer Transfer Code - wasn't it being followed?)
Jane points out that on the order form she made it very clear she already had Telecom's ADSL service, so TelstraClear would have been aware.
Jane is extremely fed up (that is the polite version and not what she actually wrote to tell me). It is appalling service from both companies; Telecom who in no way should have disconnected the Jetstream service AND the email account, they were asked to transfer it to another supplier without advising TelstraClear; in any event if their procedures tell them to cut people off who switch suppliers, how come she still has a phone line? As Jane points out, she has a cellphone and that was actually less inconvenient than having no ADSL, given she had quite a bit of work to do on Sunday, that required internet research. And as for TelstraClear, basic procedures such as a service order acknowledgement should be automatic. Keeping the customer informed should surely be obvious. It is costing her money on dial up charges and massive amounts of frustration being unable to get her work done.
If this is as good as it gets in this age of supposed competition, then it is a pretty dismal result.
In Jane's words "I want an apology. From both companies. I am still absolutely furious that I have been without ADSL since Friday for no reason other than process failure. I had a report on economic development to do this afternoon and it's taken me HOURS to do the research. It's just not good enough. I've been a customer of CLEAR/TelstraClear for 15 years and a CLEARNet customer since before the serviced launched. Andrew Makin would be turning in his grave."