Moorooka,
Qld, 4105,
Australia
3 January
2001
CEO
C&W
Dear Mr
Wallace,
I wrote to
you some time ago about unending problems that I was having with Optus and
found your response to be a courteous and helpful one -- in stark contrast to
the swinish attitude of Optus themselves.
You did not however seem to have much influence on Optus. Eventually it was our Australian Telecommunications
Ombudsman who forced them to stop blundering about and fix their problems.
I am ever
optimistic however and feel that you should know about their latest childish
behaviour in case you can do something to pull them up. I personally think you should sack the whole
of their senior staff and start again.
Perhaps their eventual new owner will do so.
Three weeks
ago, I agreed to take them on as one of my ISPs. I of course knew they would bungle even
something as simple as that but also knew that they could be made to fix it
eventually. So when the expected series
of idiocies emerged, I sent them an email to advise them of it and hopefully to
provoke them into getting it right. I
reproduce the email concerned below. The
tone of the email reflects my prior
experience of the senior staff at Optus.
So what was
their response? Something
constructive? Something positive? Something intelligent? Not on your Nelly! The very next day, they went in and changed the password on my
internet account so that I could no longer get on to the internet via
them. An attempt to annoy me was the sole extent of their talent! I of course simply rang the help line and got
the new password so even the attempt to annoy me made by these sad souls did
not work.
Are these
the sort of people you WANT to have
working for you?
Sincerely,
(Dr.) John
RAY (M.A.;Ph.D.; M.A.Ps.S.)
Mobile
Phone: 0413 836248; Landline phone: (07)
3892 2313.
Email:
Jonjayray@yahoo.com or: Jonjayray@hotmail.com
Moorooka, 4105
2 January 2000
Michelle Ford
Customer
Relations
Optus
Michelle,
I knew
it! Against all reason, I recently
signed up for another Optus service, knowing
full well that you would make a hash of it. You have!
I signed up
to use you as an Internet Service Provider on 10th December and in your anxiety
to please you have opened up for me not one account but two! I received the second letter today and the
other about a week ago. And the second
one arrived DESPITE the fact that one of your operatives rang me last week and
confirmed that I had received the first one!
You cannot get better bungling than that. That's really gold-plated bungling that
is. I doubt that any one of you could
run even a chook yard properly. No
wonder C&W is so desperate to sell you off. Maybe I should send a copy of
this to Graham Wallace in London to encourage him to get rid of you. Obviously, the sooner you go under new
management the better.
To help you
sort out your obviously hopeless records, the username you have given me that I
am actually using is Jonjayray. The one I do NOT want is Jon_jay_ray. Make sure you cancel the right one!
Now
Michelle, there is another matter I want you to exercise your mind on. I got your first letter only about a week ago
so I first logged on to your service on 30th December. But I am NOT in those circumstances going to
pay a full month's fee for the whole of December. I want you to date my account from the first
log on and charge me again only on the same date of every subsequent
month. If that is too
hard for you, I suggest that you waive the December charge.
From past
experience I know it will be a strain for you but please have the brains to get
this one sorted out now instead of going
through six months of correspondence before the TIO makes you sort it out.
Let me help
you with another matter that could save you time and money. The disk you enclosed with both your letters
to me was totally inappropriate for its use.
It was designed for people who wanted to open an account rather
than someone who already had an account opened.
The people who drafted your letters showed some awareness of this in
that they included in their letter an instruction to log on to the disk as an
existing user but when I did that the disk still sent me off on a wild goose
chase --wanting my credit card number and telling me that my chosen account
name was already in use etc.
Since the
big brains in sales there do not seem to be able to work it out, you did not
really need to ask me to use any disk at all in the circumstances. You had already assigned me an account name
and a password so all I needed was the dial-up number for my local area. Had you included a list of these with your
letter, THAT would have been useful. I
could then have simply thrown your disk in the bin straight away (which is what
I did eventually anyhow). Since you did
not do that however, I had to ring up one of your help line operators and get
the Brisbane dial-up number from him.
After that, no problem.
You really
are unbelievable amateurs.
Yours
faithfully,
(Dr.) JOHN
RAY
