Hacker News Reader

I've worked at Telstra so can shed some light on this.

1. Harassing retail staff for what is a corporate process problem is really inappropriate and pointless. I'm not surprised they called the police. Instead you should have called the TIO, ACCC or escalated via email.

2. The customer service issues at Telstra are incredibly deep and complex. It's a 40+ year old company where some of the processes still rely on dot matrix printers and faxes and there are thousands of IT systems. It's a mess. Call centres within Australia would do nothing to change the NPS which is why they were so easy to off-shore in the first place.

3. Telstra may not have a great customer service reputation. But they are one of the most revered telcos globally. They transitioned to 4G better than anyone and had the fastest network on the planet for quite some time. And they will do it again with 5G.

4. Denholm isn't hired to run customer service for Tesla. She was the CFO of a 40,000 odd employee highly technical, multi-faceted company e.g. their own venture fund. She also spent 7 years at Toyota so she has some automative experience as well as strong technical background.

> Harassing retail staff for what is a corporate process problem is really inappropriate and pointless

It's a natural human reaction. If you build a system that treats customers like shit, they will take it out on your front line staff. It's not because they're bad people, it's because you designed a business that treats customers like shit. It is not exactly surprising that a customer will not be polite to front line staff after wasting 4+ hours getting bounced around various useless departments on the phone beforehand. The blame lies on management, not on customers.

> Harassing retail staff

Asking to speak to a manager is not harassment.

> Instead you should have called the TIO, ACCC or escalated via email.

Not all of these are obvious actions when you're owed money and not getting a response from the obvious first lines of communication. Walking into a shop and asking to speak to a manager is, however, a natural next step.

> The customer service issues at Telstra are incredibly deep and complex.

That's not the fault of the customer.

> Telstra may not have a great customer service reputation. But they are one of the most revered telcos globally.

I've seen no evidence to support that in my line of work. Maybe "most revered in Asia" or "Australia" would be more accurate? Either way, "most revered telcos globally" is clearly an exaggeration.

> And they will do it again with 5G.

Pure speculation. Plus I happen to know a telco who's already begun the process of rolling out 5G transmitters. But I cannot say any more than that.

In what sense is asking someone to call their manager "harassment"?

If I call a customer service line and ask to escalate (because the bottom tier staff are useless and can only click the same buttons in a UI as I can anyway) is that harassment?

Why is it harassment for a customer to use the time of a company's employees (whilst they're on the clock), but not for a company to use the time of a customer for no reason at all, as a dark pattern to prevent customers from obtaining recourse?

A refund should be a simple matter. Cancel order, send payment, done. Without 50,000 levels of bureaucracy involved, in the UK it could be done via Faster Payments in one second.

>2. The customer service issues at Telstra are incredibly deep and complex. It's a 40+ year old company where some of the processes still rely on dot matrix printers and faxes and there are thousands of IT systems.

The fact that top management has allowed this mess to go on for so long says to me they decided to keep customer service bad because they could make more money that way.

You should have waited for the police to arrive and stated your case. A friend had a similar thing happen in a case of demanding rent from a ex room mate while I was with them. They threatened to call the police. I said go ahead. There was another witness present by myself so it wasn’t like they could claim falsely that my friend had done anything wrong. When the police arrived, I explained to them the situation and they told me my friend would not be able to demand the money then and there but asked to see the paperwork and once verified, explained to us the process for legally squeezing the money out of the room mate right in front of them. Needless to say, that shut the ex roomie up and they scraped together their share of rent within a week. Police will usually side with the law and they generally don’t like watching people get taken advantage of.

If people are in the store I’m responsible for and they blackmail me I would call security or the police, too. That‘s unacceptable behavior.

I understand your frustration, and it really sucks that Telstra put you into that situation, but that doesn’t make your behavior ok and excuse abuse of employees.

Who said anything about blackmail or abuse of employees? The GP said he asked to speak to a manager and, I quote, "wasn't being threatening at all."

I don't see an issue with refusing to leave a store when you're denied a refund you're legally owed. That's literally the least threatening form of protest one can make.

>I don't see an issue with refusing to leave a store when you're denied a refund you're legally owed.

The issue is you are literally trespassing at that point. It is illegal, you are committing a crime.

You can't take the law into your own hands. If you are "legally owed" a refund, you can take that to court, prove it, and receive judgment for your refund.

What you cannot do is judge for yourself that you are legally owed a refund and therefore entitled to stay in a retail store regardless of whether or not you are wanted there. That is not a protest, it is just exhibiting a shocking lack of self-awareness and -- trespassing.

> The issue is you are literally trespassing at that point. It is illegal, you are committing a crime.

Australian law might differ significantly to what I'm familiar with but my understanding is your two points here might not be true for someone who simply refuses to leave when asked:

I don't think a regular sales person has the authority to declare a customer as a trespasser. Wouldn't that have to come from the land owner - ie someone senior within the organisation? (assuming Telstra own the land - which isn't usually the case with shops anyway). There typically requires some formal warning too (I don't think a verbal "I'll call the police" counts, but I might be wrong). Plus if Telstra do own the land and then call someone senior then you've still won because the whole point of the sit in was to speak to a manager.

Also trespassing isn't automatically a crime. Not all offences are criminal offences thus you can be breaking the law without committing a crime. Trespassing is one of those laws that can be a criminal offence but it's not automatically one. I very much doubt someone politely refusing to leave is automatically a criminal offence.

> That is not a protest, it is just exhibiting a shocking lack of self-awareness and -- trespassing.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

So nothing illegal (however technically) can be a protest? Rosa Parks might have something to say about that.

Except that for many companies e.g. Apple, Telstra the retail stores are not the same legal entity as the company who owes you the money. Telstra's retail structure for example is mostly franchise.

So you may as well just go to McDonalds and ask them for a refund.

I understand your point however the GP did say he went to a Telstra owned store.

This is not abuse of employees, this is abuse of customers.

Define blackmail.

> That's what Denholm is bring to the table: the worst customer experience in Australia with regard to telecommunications

Being charitable, its possible that the reason she was there for less than 2 years was that she disliked the culture and found herself unable to change it.

She was the CFO there not the CEO, how does this reflect on her performance?

She's signing off on paying for the delivery of incredibly bad customer service.

Outsource everything to call centres where the agents have no authority to resolve an out of the ordinary issue and have difficulty escalating out of the ordinary issues to someone who can fix it.

How does the operation of a business not reflect on the whole C-suite? Who else is responsible?

If you paid them and they refuse to deliver, couldn't you sue them for fraud?

I got the money back 16 days and 15+ hrs on the phone and one police threat later.

Ultimately the amount of money we're talking about is trivial to me, but that's not the point.

Telsa already has a bad reputation for after sales support and spare parts. They're not doing themselves any favours here.

At least this is rather straight to fix in the us. Not related to the post itself, but in the us you just resolve the issue with your credit card company by filing a dispute.

I did this too. I was advised estimated time to resolve if successful is forty days and dependent on the other party agreeing they’ve made a mistake.

For disputes, the onus is on the merchant to prove they did not make a mistake.