If Telstra had been upfront in the beginning, and had used its Faults management system well enough to ensure that everyone who needed to know, including call cerntre personnel overseas, knew enough from the get go to adequately and accurately advice customers that the problems were flood related and what the work-arounds instituted consisted of, I know I, and I’m sure others, would have patiently waited for resolution.

In the event, being given various conflicting bits of information, and never being told the real story, created frustration.

Had someone explained to me that phones in the outage areas were being diverted to Telstra Service numbers I could have deduced that these were located interstate, asked the obvious question and worked out that the reason I could not reach local numbers was because the system was interpreting my attempts as coming from interstate and therefore lacking the 07 area code.

A good hard look at the decision-making process and customer relationship management is warranted.

During the conversation and the subsequent call back later I gleaned some information:
a. my phone had been diverted and it took me a little while to convince him that I had not authorised that. I had already been alerted to the fact that while it appeared to be dead it just rang out. Turned out that this was a diversion to a Telstra service number. The diversion was removed but I was also told that in areas of outage (which he says Kenmore is, though the flood management section said there was no outage any more) they have diverted phones through service numbers to allow us to make and receive calls. So it would appear another diversion is still in place.
b. He asked if when I was dialling Queensland numbers I used the 07 area code.
c. He told me that they couldn’t do remote testing of the exchange so between yesterday and Monday a technician would be sent to the Chapel Hill Exchange to plug his phone into my line to check the problem.

Within a couple of minutes I received a text message saying the issue was resolved. Of course it is not fixed. It would seem that Telstra defines “resolved” to mean something like “passed on to someone else”.

So I tried dialling a local number with the 07 prefix – and it worked. Doesn’t without it. That would suggest that if/when the phone is diverted it is diverted to an interstate number, so to call locally one has to pretend one is in another state. Obviously I’m loathe to do that too often as no doubt I will be charged as if I was making an STD call.

Beggars belief that Telstra can’t explain all of this on these updates, and that despite a service management system, no one seems to know what you’ve told anyone in previous calls.

Part of the problem, so a Telstra executive told me many years ago, is their performance measurement standards. When you require staff to meet a standard of 95% of faults to be fixed within 48 hours it stands to reason that they will always treat the simple ones as a priority because if it can’t be fixed in 48 hours it does not harm to the performance record if it takes 6 months to fix.

I’ve had some progress since my call to the Flood Management Section. Both my phone lines are now dead as doornails. Not the result I was hoping for. Like you, promises of call backs and text messages have not be fulfilled