Telstra's arrogance

Telstra's arrogance has no bounds.

Yes, it's my favourite whipping subject. My internet, pay television, landline phone and mobile phone provider has upset me again. As a long term customer of no less than four of it's services I might have expected they would treat me with consideration even if long ago I lost any expectation from them of service efficiency. Why oh why I still expected a reasonable business-like response from Telstra when all my exchanges with them for, at a guess, the past five years have ended only in frustration and rage on my part I cannot say.

Towards the end of last year my broadband internet connection was slowed to worse than I experienced in the old 'dial up' days and became just as unstable. The reason for this effective loss of broadband according to a series of automatically generated emails Telstra sent me was that I had reached the 12GB monthly entitlement for my plan. I was surprised by this as I had never previously exceeded my plan and had always assumed I was well within my entitlement, although in fairness I was not in the habit of checking my useage meter and for all I know I might have flirted with the limit in the past.

I followed the advice in the emails to check my useage meter and noted also that the emails indicated an option to upgrade my plan if I so wished. After checking the online information I decided I would upgrade my plan from 12GB per month to 20GB per month for an additional $20 per month which I did by following the various prompts. A message from Telstra confirming my upgrade request stated it would take effect from midnight that day and, rather confusingly, would take effect after certain checks which would require approximately three business days. As my online request was made late on a Friday with a weekend and a public holiday Monday to follow I assumed Telstra's contradictory messages could mean a week's delay before the upgrade took effect. I did not understand why a function performed online would need that processing time but hey this is Telstra so I bided my time.

A week passed and no upgrade occurred. I waited a few more days and when still no upgrade was evident I went back online and submitted a further upgrade request. This produced the same contradictory messages as previously. I waited another week but still there was no upgrade.

Now it was time to phone Telstra and oh how I detest doing that. As usual a call to Telstra meant passing through a series of automatic gateways and after the usual irritating messages and recorded greetings I finally reached 'Michael',  a call centre operator. I explained my problem and waited patiently through the Muzak for 'Michael' to sort it out.

After a while 'Michael' returned to inform me that I have a 'bundled' service and that my online request had a generated an error message because 'I had tried to change my plan without applying to change my bundle'. In other words it was all my fault. Never mind that I followed the online prompts exactly. Never mind that the online prompt reads 'change my plan' and does not read 'change my bundle'.

Anyway, the everhelpful 'Michael' could upgrade my plan but not to the 20GB extra $20 per month offered by the online service. Why not? Because that plan is only a 'standalone plan' and is not offered within a bundled service. 'Michael' could offer me the equivalent upgrade within my bundle but at $60 extra per month! I could get around that by purchasing the upgrade as a 'standalone plan' but then I would incur a penalty for breaking my bundle contract. Either way, an upgrade performed by 'Michael' would need about 48 hours to take effect. Of course!

As I said at the outset, Telstra's arrogance has no bounds.