Telstra? I feel sorry for the staff mainly.

 

Telstra Logo

I spent some time in a Telstra store today. Nothing new in that, we’ve all probably done it at some time or another. And what a fascinating and depressing thing it is to do.

 

The first thing you notice is the queues. Queues to pay their bill, queues to buy a phone and worse, the one I needed,  the queue to make a make a complaint, get something fixed or find out about something queried before. This was by far the biggest queue. Sigh.

The second thing you notice is the sign at each “consultants” post – “My Service”. The jury is still out on that.

OK, let’s be realistic here and put the situation in perspective before I get to the nub of this post. From what I can glean, all Telstra shops are under-staffed. With the masses of paperwork it appears are foisted on them for the simplest task, I can understand that it can be overwhelming and secondly, training up new staff is problematic due to the sheer volume of what they need to learn. This tech related business is tricky stuff I know. I’m in it.

But that aside, the logistics of how they work defy sane practice. I was in the queue for 1 hour before getting attended to by a badly stressed young lady. Now I had been watching while she dealt with the chap in the beanie and dreadlocks before me (I mention this for colour and not a slur on dreadlocked beanie wearers). To satisfy his problem needed a fax from the bowels of some Telstra Department Somewhere from a stroppy person Who Was Very Busy – apparently. This was at least 20 minutes of my delay. When the Beanied one suggested that she attend to me while awaiting this fax she replied with “no, this means doing two things at once and that’s not allowed”. Hmm.

A little old lady – literally – had been standing in one of the other queues. When queried, she had been there for TWO hours. She asked if she could have a chair to sit on, but none could be found apart from those firmly ensconced under the bottoms of the sales consultants and their customers. The reason given by a supervisor as to why there were no spare chairs? Management deem it unprofessional to be seen to have customers sitting down. Makes it look like they are waiting. So standing for two hours is alright then.

Speaking of the supervisor, she spent the entire time with a clipboard looking very busy indeed wafting around asking everyone repeatedly why they were there and scribbling down notes. Now I ask. Why was she asking if she wasn’t going to do anything about it? Just make a note. Surely her time is far better served by actually trying to get the queue down?

Behind the consultant counter was The Door. Lots of people came and went through The Door repeatedly. No matter what you had to do, as a consultant, there was some step in the process that required you to say “just a minute” and go through The Door for 10 minutes. I kid you not, people in my queue were taking a sweepstake on whether there was a bar back there. But more annoying was that there was frosted glass in the door, and it could plainly be seen that there were lots of people behind The Door doing something except serving customers. What were they? Bar staff? Stress managers? We’ll never know.

One person in another queue was about to explode in an apoplectic fit. She had bought a new mobile the day before from Telstra, and 24 hours later she still couldn’t make a phone call on it. Every time she tried, she would get a recorded message saying she had to ring a specific number, but couldn’t get through. So she came into the Telstra shop, stood in the queue and was eventually told they couldn’t help her and she had to ring the number herself and was offered one of the freebie phones on the wall. Finally she got through and was advised that no, they couldn’t help her as they were not allowed to take this sort of call from a Telstra shop phone. It HAD to be from her mobile. So she was told to go back into the queue. Blatant stupidity. The supervisor got on the Telstra Shop phone to talk to invisible person who was smitten with the aforementioned blatant stupidity. The slanging match in the shop was interesting. My transactions (a replacement Blackberry under warranty) were completed before they had finished. And that took 35 minutes.

I suspect that the Fone Zone shop across the way does a lot of business judging by the walkouts. But maybe not as the size of the queues didn’t change; they kept pouring in. Poor sods.

So agreed, it’s bad for the customers, but I suspect it is far, far worse for the staff. I wouldn’t work there. Take pity on ’em next time you are in there. And write to David Thodey.