TelstraClear games give stressed staff 'element of fun in tough working day'
TelstraClear call centre staff are given time off at work to play rock, paper, scissors and make paper aeroplanes.
But the company says the games, which provide "an element of fun in a tough working day", have nothing to do with long waiting times which have infuriated many customers.
The Weekend Herald revealed last week that out of 10 internet service providers, TelstraClear customers were left waiting the longest to get human support when phoning for help.
This week a former TelstraClear call centre worker, who requested anonymity, said customers often abused staff or cried into the phone.
In a bid to lighten the stressful, high-pressure days, managers initiated activities with staff which involved competitions and playing games.
"I think they were trying to have some time off the phones and something less stressful to do. It would be completely bizarre ... you can see they were trying to find some way to create a positive atmosphere but it wasn't really sensible, it was really childish."
Staff, mostly aged between 17 and in their 20s, were trained for three weeks in the company's services before they started accepting calls, he said.
They were paid from about $20 an hour, with bonuses depending on how many calls they answered, how long it took to solve a customer's problem and how the call was handled.
"It can be quite a stressful job. Some customers are incredibly angry and they're not nice people to deal with.
"So you would get people bursting into tears, you would have people yelling and swearing at you and pretty much as soon as you finish a conversation you've got to go on to the next call with no down time to get over the previous call. At the end of the day you've built up all this emotional madness of people screaming at you and you've got to go home to go and do the same thing the next day.
"I was getting completely stressed and I just had to go."
TelstraClear spokesman Chris Mirams said activities including rock, paper, scissors were widespread within the contact centre industry.
"Activities of this nature are used to embed knowledge, raise awareness of new initiatives, processes and products. They are never used to remove staff from taking customer calls during periods of increased wait times. The purpose is to incorporate an element of fun in a tough working day and help increase effectiveness."
An anonymous email from a TelstraClear call centre worker said customers could help themselves by not calling with problems that could be solved by turning their modem off and on again - advice they were given by voice message during lengthy waits.
"Yes, our wait times are bad, but if our customers would simply think, then it wouldn't be so bad."
GROWING PAINS BLAMED FOR FAILURES - IT WON'T HAPPEN AGAIN, SAYS TELCO
TelstraClear is embarrassed and apologetic about its slow customer service after the failure of staff to respond to some customer queries.
And the company is adamant a proposal to move its consumer contact centre to Manila would resolve rather than cause more problems.
TelstraClear's consumer chief, Steve Jackson, said the telco had "serious growing pains" after a 30 per cent increase in broadband customers in the past year.
He said the company, which has 300,000 customers, had not expected such high demand and became overloaded after starting new broadband services in October.
"These are growing pains. They are very embarrassing," he said.
"We've been working really hard over the last two or three months to clear those problems to make sure every customer's got the service they've ordered and we'll be doing everything within our power to make sure that it doesn't happen in the future as we continue to grow."
Mr Jackson said 80 to 90 per cent of customers wouldn't have had problems but there was a "significant minority who've had some fairly major issues".
"When someone may not have been contacted it was because somebody didn't do what they were meant to do in this new network process and it was just the pressure and the volume of that."
He believed it was back to "business as usual" now.
Mr Jackson was confident the situation would not be worsened if a proposal to move the call centre overseas, announced on Tuesday, went ahead.
Telecom was criticised for outsourcing its 018 call centre to Manila.
The chief executive of the Telecommunications Users Association, Ernie Newman, said TelstraClear's blaming unexpected demand was not good enough.
"That's not a fair response, I don't think, in any industry. If you're that popular then you are making oodles of money and you can afford to put more resources into your customer service.
"I would argue that any phone company, if there's a problem because of excess demand, then surely the first thing it does is put more people on."
Mr Newman said all the call centres rated "near the bottom of the heap" because of the complex technical elements involved in handling problems and the perception that large companies held the power over consumers.
Similar grumbles were seen in power company and bank call centres.
CUSTOMERS' STORIES
The Weekend Herald received a huge response from TelstraClear customers after a story last week which tested the times taken by 10 internet providers to answer a call with a human voice.
PHILLIP SMITH
Auckland man Phillip Smith said he became so frustrated with TelstraClear's failure to connect his landline when he moved house, that he switched to Telecom. He gave the company two weeks notice when he moved from Mairangi Bay to Browns Bay in November but was still without a phoneline at his new home a month later. He became angered by staff constantly blaming contractors and other people and was told on at least three occasions that he should just wait between three to five days. Mr Smith said he was disgusted to receive a $57 bill from TelstraClear for a connection fee - for a phoneline the company never connected. Refusing to wait on extremely long phonecall queues to solve the problem again, Mr Smith said it took until last Monday before his problem was solved, when TelstraClear finally responded to say they had waived the fee.
PETER BANKS
Peter Banks reckons the service he had with his TelstraClear connection was second to none - but the support was shocking. Now with Telecom, the IT engineer, who works between Wellington and Auckland, said the company's cable service in Wellington had been fantastic but he had struggled with long waits for service support before the left the company three years ago. He was told that because he was not a business customer he would have to wait of up to five days each time he needed help. "They didn't really want to know about it ... most of the time I would be ringing for 20 minutes to 40 minutes before they answered the phone - they're really slow. "Everybody wants to blame everybody else," he said. "But I think Telstra's definitely got the worst support if you've got a problem."
IAN MILES
Ian Miles failed to connect TelstraClear so many times without success that he resorted to using one of the products the service was supposed to supersede - the fax. That was 17 days ago and he has still not heard back. The Featherston man, who fixes computers part time, was helping a friend with a problem with her dial-up internet when he needed to contact the company. He said the pair attempted to call TelstraClear about 12 times. "We kept on ringing the 0800 number and it came up with a plastic voice - push this, push that - everybody was busy at the time and bang! It just dropped us off. So I sent a fax saying please contact me ... we waited, and waited, and waited and believe it or not we're still waiting." After some effort, Mr Miles sorted the problem himself by restoring some settings - but this was only possible because of his computer expertise.
MARINA HUMBERSTONE
After signing up with a door-to-door salesperson in January, who said a connection would take about 10 days, Glenfield woman Marina Humberstone is still fed up with waiting. Mrs Humberstone called to find out what the problem was and waited more than 30 minutes to be told it would take another three weeks. When the call was finally answered, TelstraClear initially blamed her current internet provider, Woosh, before admitting in a another call - three weeks later - that the delay was the company's own doing and the issue would be resolved in about two weeks. After waiting another four weeks, she phoned the company last week and spoke to a supervisor. When she said she was rethinking her involvement with the company, she was told there might be a charge for cancelling her contract. "I don't even feel like there is a contract," she said. "I'm really upset."
