Yesterday I decided to apply for one of the newly released Naked DSL accounts with IInet since I currently don’t have, nor do I want a fixed phone line (a point that they seem to forget). After spending an annoyingly long time on the phone with one of their sales representatives they were going to go away and provision the accounts. For the life of me I can’t understand how it can take 10-15 days to provision an account (talking with the guys from Tuscan IT at the Silicon Beach House apparently in some countries this is down to 24 hours – we can but dream!)
This morning I get an email from the provisioning department stating:
Service Address Not Found
The service address you provided does not match Telstra’s records or can not be found. Please contact your telephone provider to obtain the correct details. Once you have these details, please re-submit your application.
Ok, now remembering that I don’t have a phone line, how do I contact my telephone provider? I got on the phone to Telstra only to be railroaded by their voice system, first to their call centre (which apparently is closed, despite it being 8:30am and well within their operating hours) and then to BigPond (which I doubt would have been helpful so I hung up). I then got back on the phone to IInet and spoke with one of their sales reps, I was promptly put on hold for what felt like hours. Eventually she came back to me and said that she had spoken with the provisioning department and they were going to “try again” – WHAT – why didn’t they “try harder” the first time and save me 30 minutes of my time?
I’m not sure what the moral of this story is – unfortunately quality of service is not something any of the telcos/isps value particularly highly. Perhaps it’s got to do with the pathetic level of competition in Australia.