Apart from a couple of landline telephone connections in pre-competition days, I’ve managed to avoid being a Telstra customer for most of my adult life. I consider myself fortunate that I’ve had very little chance to take part in the national sport of Telstra bashing, but I don’t need to be a customer to wonder why on earth anyone would choose Telstra over its competitors if a choice is available. Unfortunately, my current 3G mobile coverage-scarce living circumstances have forced me to purchase a Telstra mobile broadband service and my Telstra experience has begun.

Firstly, Telstra’s mobile broadband is ludicrously expensive compared to its competitors. Like, stupidly so. My current residence is within the advertised 3G zones of several providers but is relatively remote and located in a valley, cutting off all signals but Telstra’s. Rotten luck.

Secondly, to activate the service I had to call a Telstra 125 phone number that was not available from my non-Telstra mobile phone. Brilliant. Thanks, Telstra.

Thirdly, four hours after I called the 125 number from a Telstra landline the account activation, promised within two hours, hadn’t occur. I called the number back, waited for 20 or so minutes because Telstra was “experiencing a higher number of calls than usual”, and explained the problem to the operator. “Could you check to see the progress of the activation?” I asked.

“Sir, can I ask if you have turned your computer on and off?” she asked. Reading from a script that may or may not have been related to my problem.

“Yes, I have. Could you bring up my account on the screen and check the progress of my activation?” I asked again.

“I will, but first can I check which operating system you are using,” she pushed on relentlessly.

“Why?”

“So I can diagnose the problem with your computer.”

“But,” I sighed heavily, “wouldn’t it make more sense to see if the activation has even occurred before we rip my computer apart looking for a problem that doesn’t exist?”

“Well, I can bring that information up,” the operator grudgingly conceded, “but you will need to hold for a minute.”

“I am more than happy with that.”

A minute later she came back on the phone. “The activation is still in progress,” she reported.

“Okay. So how much longer will it take?” I asked.

“I cannot tell, sir.”

“You see, I was told no longer than two hours and it’s been four now.”

“I could re-submit the activation request for you if you’d like,” she offered.

“Will that be quicker?” I asked

“The other one is still in progress or I could resubmit it,” she answered.

“I understand that, but I just want to know which course of action will be quicker: waiting or re-submitting?”

“I could do either for you, sir,” she answered confidently, not at all answering the question.

“Oh, look,” I exclaimed exasperatedly, “just do whatever you think is the quickest.”

So after going through the entire activation process again, and being read “no more than two hours” from the same script, we got to the end of the call. “Have I resolved everything for you today, sir?” the operator asked.

“More or less, I guess,” I answered.

“Are you happy with your Telstra experience?” she then asked.

I was a bit taken aback by this question, asked robotically and in too-cheerful a voice. One part of me thought it might just be a hollow piece of script designed to make Telstra look like it cared, and the other part of me thought it might be a genuine question, set to be followed up by clarifying questions, with my answer and details somehow feeding back to the company in a meaningful fashion so they could improve the Telstra experience. Taking a punt on the latter I answered, “No.”

“Okay, sir,” the operator said cheerfully, “thankyou for calling Telstra.”

Now, this sort of conversation will be familiar to anyone who’s ever had to call a major company for any sort of sales or support matter; crappy customer service is in no way unique to Telstra. I wasn’t even angry about the whole activation thing because the problem was rather minor and these types of phone calls are just part of doing business with modern corporations – I’d readied myself for having to do just this. But the final question and the response to my answer seemed to me to be taking the piss.

Customer service to most larger corporations is nothing more than a metric to be measured and then tracked on a graph against expenditure. It’s likely that the number of “yes” and “no” answers collected by Telstra’s call centres each month somehow feed into a few executives’ salary packages. Real customer service – all of the stuff that comes before asking the question – is not rocket science, but it is expensive and difficult.

In the corporation’s perfect world it would employ the fewest possible service agents in the cheapest call centres in the world, providing the lowest level of training and delegated responsibility possible. In the customer’s perfect world they would be able to call corporations, have their call answered immediately by an Australia service agent in an Australian call centre, and have that agent individually and rigourously solve their problem. Somewhere in the middle is the answer.

This is not at all an anti-foreign call centre rant. This is a rant against call centres of any nationality staffed by under-trained operators who have not been adequately brought up to speed on the products they service and lack the ability and/or permission to think independently or creatively about the problems they are asked by customers to solve. You train script-reading monkeys and you’ll get script-reading monkeys, regardless of their accents. This is a rant against the culture that thrives in almost all call centres most of us have dealt with in Australia or elsewhere.

My needs as a customer are pretty simple. I just want the person who answers my call to get across my problem quickly, take it seriously, and prove to me that they are working on finding a solution as efficiently as possible. I want the person who answers my call to be capable of and permitted to think creatively and independently and take initiative. If this was to happen, even if my problem took some time to solve, I would answer an emphatic “yes” to a question about my satisfaction with my experience.

If Telstra were to invest a bunch of money into changing the culture of their call centres and training customer service agents instead of script monkeys I might even consider paying their fucking insulting prices for their fucking inferior products.

Postscript: It took another 36 hours for my service to become active, in which time I was told by the activation call centre that their system would be down for 24 hours for routine maintenance. In the end I threw a tantrum in the direction of the @Telstra Twitter account and — surprise, surprise! — my problem was promptly solved once a properly trained and free-thinking person with the ability to make independent decisions got involved.