Primus: 10 hours unpaid labor to connect a phone.
COMMENT, Australia — Call centre workers are an unloved occupation. But industry practise, and individual behavior are at least partly responsible.
The reality is basic infrastructure and services no longer work in Australia, which by Western standards has approaching the worst service ethics of any English-speaking country. Even worse than England, and that is saying something.
I still remember the Telstra monopoly float, wasn’t that supposed to improve telecommunication industry service?
Now to the latest debacle…
Primus Telecommunications: a herd of slovenly telecommunication cows wandering across the ‘fibre-optic’ dirt-track of Australia
To connect a single phone line it goes like this during office relocations, at companies like Primus Telecommunications:
Day 1) Send a fax
Day 2) Customer Service lose fax
Day 3) Follow-up fax, told ‘you didn’t send it’
Day 5) Use friends fax as old fax disconnected
Day 5) Follow-up fax
Wait!
Day 9) No technician scheduled, call Primus, leave message
Day 11) Technician scheduled over a week later
Day 15) Finally follow-up of new connection
Day 21) Phone connected, technician shows up without paperwork or ID badge
Day 25) No voicemail or other services, requested on Day 1
Day 26-28) Repeated calls to Primus
Day 30) Voicemail connected, instructions sent, minus new access number
Day 33) Voicemail instructions incomplete, email Primus, told to call Primus
After 21 days one phone line connected. After 33 days, one line connected without functioning voicemail.
This is an approximate timeline of an actual experience. Repeated daily across Australia, no doubt.
I would like to point out connecting a single new line is a simple task. Heaven forbid a complex routing and re-routing of calls and lines. Been through one of those, never again.
The costs of inefficiency
Cost - around 10 man-hours managing a single connection. Lost calls. And around $10 in calls to Primus, as well as around $20 extra cell-phone calls.
Why should customers have to send repeated faxes and make repeated calls to follow-up a core basic service request? A phone line is basic infrastructure.
Why does nothing happen in Australia’s service industry, unless it is followed up 10 times?
Plus the stress of knowing you cannot do anything, bar call the Telecommunications Ombudsman after the fact. And offering less protection to business, than consumers.
What about shareholders?
Worse yet for Primus, the cost to them of this staggering inefficiency and wilful stupidity is a direct burden on their shareholders.
But no one cares in Australia. Efficiency is not an Australian ‘way of being’.
And the labor pool in Australia in core service jobs (like telecoms, shops or waitressing) is so shallow that if someone has a pulse, can read and write, turns up almost on time and doesn’t steal (too much)… then the employer probably begs them to stay.
Is that efficient?
This is repeated every day at every company across Australia. Very little work gets done, as so much time is spent following up promised made by others.
Further, Howard running the economy at high-speed has left to gaps in basic services.
I wish I could say Primus was the worst. They are not.
With Optus a co-worker received someone else’s SMS and voicemail on their cell phone. According to Optus this was impossible, yet I saw it happen more than once.
With Telstra, a company had the calls from a sexual health line forwarded to their main switchboard, when assigning new numbers.
Smaller telecommunication companies regularly breach acceptable standards according to customer reports to consumer bodies, and in telecom forums like Whirlpool.
Where’s competitive choice?
When you are choosing incompetent idiots 1, 2 or 3 where’s the choice?
Politicians will talk about competition. Where?
Ah, there is none. By keeping standards equally low across the board, no one competes really. Not on service. Maybe on price.
Primus, you used to be good. Oh well, we welcome your likely bankruptcy in the next 3-5 years.
(Most telecommunication companies have such bad accounts they have no idea of their actual profit, something OneTel learnt the hard way. Only monopolies survive long-run, unless they are bankrolled by someone with deep pockets like SingTel.)
Australia and Australian service workers need to stop being short, rude, unprofessional, arrogant, unco-operative and start doing their jobs.
Why efficiency and productivity matters…
Australians need to be alert and alarmed at how inefficient Australia is, how unproductive Australia is. Because increased productivity is the lever of ultimate economic growth, and as is well-documented, countries like Australia need to ‘punch-above-weight’ on labor productivity.
This notion of asset-driven wealth is a Faustian pact of the far-right that leads to recession. It’s productivity, stupid!
Property prices are national navel-gazing, and subject to bubbles. Real long-term national wealth comes through productive deployment of assets, and labor productivity, an area Australia’s service industries are woefully inadequate at.
Australian companies, for their part, need to reward good customer service and stop viewing it as a cost centre. Most executives slash costs in service, resulting in bonuses for them. Yet customers pay, and cannot switch when all companies offer poor service.
As with banks, the notion that switching really makes a difference is flawed. Industry players frequently implicitly collude on service levels, competing on flashy ‘brand’ advertisements not features and services.
It’s Internationally Uncompetitive
More alarmingly, in comparative terms, Americans, nor most West European countries, would tolerate these shockingly low service standards, dishonesty and arrogance of Australian service firms.
Yet we expect foreign investors to invest here. Australia has a reputation overseas for not delivering on basic services to the level promised. And in inbound foreign investment, it is always the practical aspects.
Hernando De Soto did some interesting work in the area of comparing emerging or 3rd-world economies to the West, specifically on how long basic business establishment tasks take, and their effect on economies.
Australia is falling behind the English-speaking and European world. And it’s a slippery slope for Australia, without strong regulation as a stick to ensure telecommunication compliance.
Regulation, a partial answer
The lack of professionalism of individuals at Primus and other telcos is against Australia’s national interest.
It’s time to regulate and control telecommunication companies. Telecommunication companies provide infrastructure in the national interest, and are core business in developing new entrepreneurial and global businesses.
Therefore telecommunication companies should be subject to national interest considerations. Commitment to training must be enforced, as must minimum standards that result in penalties if they are not met.
Example: a line must be connected in 5 working days, or the telecommunication company pays a fine of $800 per line, per week.
As long as they remain inefficient, telecommunications cost shareholders returns, business investment and Australia’s standing in terms of business innovation.
So the carrot of self-regulation doesn’t work. Let’s try the stick.
PETER BERGER with analysis contributions by CHRISTOPHER HIRE
I used to work for Primus. Are they still trading?
I think the only way to have a really efficient telecommunications system is to have a monopoly run by the government – This will ensure that customer service delivered to electors who vote drives telecommunications instead of profit or reduced losses which sadly seems to be the case with many smaller telcos. I think that alot of the second tier telcos are only there because they cherry pick Business customers by using surplus capacity of the Telstra network.
Whilst those who do not need a better deal get subsidised calls via renting their own trunk & plugging into Telstra’s surplus capacity via a 2nd tier telco , the losers are consumers & small business who a/ subsidise big businesses free ride and b/ miss out on a world class teleco system because i/ the small telecos do not build meaningful infrastructure and ii the big one ie Telstra does not build as much new infrastructure because it doesn’t get the return they would otherwise get if there weren’t competitors cherrypicking profits that would otherwise be invested in much needed infrastructure.
So what we have is an inefficient telco system with a wasteful and inefficient use of resources ie duplication of functions ie each telco has admin, billing & customer service depts and more importantly a telco system that is incapable of significanct and necessary investment on the scale needed to replace clunky infrastructure.
Many idealogues are obsessed with competition in the Telecommunications caper for its own sake yet it has been technology not competition that has been the driver of price reduction of Telecommunications services. I’d say renationalise Telecommunications lock stock and barrel and send the bludger companies home. However a compromise as a starting point could be as follows.
If i was Rudd I would renationalise the infrastructure or wholesale part of Telstra ie the cables, networks, exchanges, phone lines, customer database etc and set it up as a statutory authority ie Telecommunications Infrastructure Authority. This bodies brief would be telecommunications infrastructure and telecommunications infrastructure only which would have strict rules that prevent people who work for it having any role in retail telecommunications companies to avoid a conflict of Interest. This body would then lease out its infrastructure to retail telecommunications operatives who would compete on price on a level playing field.
It is silly that different companies such as Optus and Primus build bits of network which really amounts to duplication of what is already there in Telstra’s network. So whilst the well paid boffins & marketing spin doctors & hired guns argue the case of their sponsor Audtralia’s telecommunications infrastructure becomes more and more clunkier and more and more outdated. Rudd and co are talking about putting out tenders to build infrastructure ie faster broadband. This will only result in more bunfights amongst the lawyers and the boffins. If Labor really wants world class broadband the government should build the network themselves and as a compromise in the short term then lease it back to retail telcos. This is the only way i can see that Australia will ever get decent telecommunications services as it used to have under the direction of and the monopoly enjoyed by the Postmaster Generals Department(PMG). The raw deal rural Australia gets in the Telco caper is a direct reflection of the competition regime in place now. Under the PMG cross subsidisation existed, ie a uniform price was set for services even though providing services to country areas might have actually cost more than providing services to city areas. A monopoly can do this – sadly competition and the pathetic attempts to regulate it can’t.
I absolutly agree…………..I think the Chinese and the Indians will bury Australia!!
I have had a gutsful of Iprimus and they have the nerve to offer me ADSL2 provided I bundle my land line with them, all I have to say to that is:
Fool me once………shame on you! fool me twice………shame on me!!
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