Many people love to hate Telecom.It's a big company with big goals and sometimes the little people feel a bit downtrodden.While Private Bin doesn't claim to have the clout of Paul Holmes, who seems to have no difficulty in reaching boss Paul Reynolds with
Many people love to hate Telecom.
It’s a big company with big goals and sometimes the little people feel a bit downtrodden.
While Private Bin doesn’t claim to have the clout of Paul Holmes, who seems to have no difficulty in reaching boss Paul Reynolds with his complaint as noted in the esteemed, august HoS, we feel our aggravation should be noted.
On Thursday, some time between the first after work beer and the last, Private Bin’s colleague was cut off from the world of texting.
Our colleague didn’t become aware of this until some time Friday when a number of texts sent were not returned and people claimed they didn’t receive them.
It turned out, after the first bout of communication with possibly offshore Telecom call centre staff on Friday night, that someone had removed the facility from the phone account.
“Who,” we asked.
“I don’t have that information,” came the reply.
“Can you fix it?”
“It should be working within two hours.”
Click.
Then it was noticed the voice mail wasn’t working.
Dial 123, again.
Ring ring, ring ring…
A nice, young sounding 5’10” bikini clad computer voice answered.
Our colleague preferred a real person, rather than a robot, so uttered a few unintelligibles into the mouthpiece to eventually speak to someone with an accent…
… who put him through to a best of kiwiana CD.
Our colleague, had his Friday night dinner, wrangled the kid into eating her dinner, stacked the dishwasher, cleaned up the kitchen and turned on the waste disposal.
While still on hold on the mobile, our hero then called 123… this time on the landline, while still on hold with the mobile.
Bikini girl voice came on again… followed by a real person whose name began with P… not Paul Reynolds.
After suggesting that the minutes were ticking over towards an hour on hold with one phone, our hero was reluctant to be placed on hold again with the other.
After lots of pointless gesticulating and theatrical sighs, it seems the P-person managed to speed up the process and ensure that the call would be picked up if it was sent through to the mobile phone problem fixers.
As the mobile phone ticked over an hour on hold, a voice of wisdom came through on the landline handset.
“Hang up your mobile,” she said.
“But I’ve only been on hold for an hour and I haven’t heard all the songs twice yet,” our hero replied.
“If you don’t hang up, we can’t fix the problem.”
“Do you promise to fix it?”
“Oh, yes.”
Click.
A sequence of instructions followed, which supposedly fixed the texting problem, which hadn’t actually been fixed the first time after all.
“Where did the texts go?” our hero asked.
“Your phone sent them?”
“Oh yes. All of them.”
“I don’t know,” was the reply.
Could there be a purgatory for text messages? A place where they are locked into a kind of limbo requiring the efforts of a virtual psychic to contact them?
Private Bin doesn’t know.
“I’ll have to call you back in two minutes… no, maybe 20 minutes on the voice mail matter.”
When that call came through, they said our hero hadn’t activated his voice mail and needed to.
“Oh, but I have,” our hero said.
“It was working, it had a message from me asking those who call to leave a message. Isn’t that how it works?” Our hero asked.
“Yes, but you haven’t done that,” the voice said.
“But, I did. Ask anyone who couldn’t reach me, especially those whose calls I screen when I don’t want to talk to them.”
“Oh,” was the reply.
“So?”
“So, you’ll have to do it again.”
“Again?”
“Yes, again.”
Our hero enquired as to why this happened.
A shrug could almost be heard over the phone.
At one point it was pointed out to our hero that he was on the OLD CDMA system, rather than XT.
However, Private Bin would like to point out that it was Telecom that backed that system, rather than our hero in this story. Our hero is just a customer who is unwilling to part with more hard-earned cash to upgrade the faultless XT system.
Private Bin understands that if our hero is forced to upgrade, it would likely be with another contender. However, Telecom would probably be better placed just to give everyone on the old system free handsets and trouble-free migration if they don’t want to contend with it.
Our hero’s phone continues to have problems with text transmission and he has yet to generate a new voice mail message – he’s on a budget and it costs money to do that.
Telecom has since responded to our hero and is endeavouring to get to the bottom of the problem. A couple of mea culpas were expressed for the wait time on Friday night. In part the explanation was due to a high level of "tier 2" calls... that is calls that are too complicated for the first line of defense at 123.
Private Bin was told the company was looking into technology that would allow the customer to dial in and then request a call back, without losing a place in the queue. We suppose the uptake of that will depend on the quality of the hold music and how long the CD is before it repeats.
