How customer-centric are you really?

Our household is probably one of the last in the country to have changed over to the NBN. I was quite content with my cable internet service and had heard many stories of grief about poor product delivery of the NBN. But after a number of notices to say our cable service was coming to an end in our suburb, I asked a number of friends what their experiences were like with ISPs. Aussie Broadband kept coming up as a positive so I lined up Aussie, Internode and my existing provider Telstra on a web chat at the same time. Aussie Broadband were the fastest to respond and had a compelling offer - their customer service was informative, quick and friendly. Telstra were slowest and would not offer me their new customer offer so after 17 years having my internet with Telstra I switched to Aussie and have had a pretty good run so far.

Recently I had to transfer some money to someone for a birthday gift - they texted me their bank account details but, having not had their reading glasses with them, gave me an incorrect digit. As such, I had sent the money to the wrong account. Instead of being able to correct this online immediately, I had to sit on hold for 45mins on the phone with Commbank - with no offer of a call-back service.

Last year, I had to cancel a family ski holiday to Mt. Buller because of a COVID lockdown - Mt. Buller Resort refunded my money without question and it was back in my account 2 days later. Qantas told me - after 2 hours on hold - that it would take 8 weeks for my money to land back in my bank account.

Telstra, Commbank and Qantas all promote themselves as being “customer-centric” and yet when the rubber hits the road, they’re not. It’s one thing to spend millions of dollars in advertising to say you are all for the customer but when your back-office operations fail to deliver, that investment is wasted as jaded customers recount their tales of woe on social media. Maybe that ad money should have been channeled into funding more customer service personnel - every time I’ve called a customer service centre over the past few years they’ve all said they are “experiencing an usually high level of call volumes” - and I’ve called morning, midday and evening. Here’s a thought - add more call centre people.

A company’s brand needs to walk the talk in everything it does and if your walk’s not ready, don’t start the talk. Fix the walk first.