#callcentre — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

AJ Sadauskas @[email protected] · 2026-06-17 · 09:51 UTC

@joannaholman @gabriel @bagder @Su_G The other thing that often happens is that the customer is justified at being angry, but not at the customer service worker they're speaking to.

Many, many years ago when I was between uni courses, I had a helpdesk job at Telstra (back when such jobs were still done in Australia).

Under Sol Trujillo.

There were many, many anti-consumer decisions made by management.

The internal business systems were a broken mess that regularly had outages.

They were significantly more expensive than other telcos. "Premium products have premium prices" was a phrase used unironically.

There was stuff going on like outbound telemarketing call centres contracted by the company that were illegally signing people up for products they didn't order. The first some knew they were on a $79 a month plan for 24 months was when the Nokia arrived.

There were KPIs on things like adherence to schedule, conformance to rostered hours, and calls per hour.

And they expected 20% of calls, including for tech support or billing, to result in a sale.

It was also incredibly siloed, so one person couldn't resolve an issue alone.

Awful, horrible place to work.

So you'd end up with customers who'd been transferred four or five times and being told different things by different staff.

Complicated edge case issues often fell through the cracks.

Needless to say, customers were justifiably angry.

And the poor wretch who tried to fix the problem for the person who'd just been transferred four times took the brunt of it.

#Telstra #australia #enshittification #customerservice #helpdesk #callcentre #callcenter #techsupport

#telstra #australia #enshittification #customerservice #helpdesk #callcentre

AJ Sadauskas @[email protected] · 2026-06-17 · 09:51 UTC

@joannaholman @gabriel @bagder @Su_G The other thing that often happens is that the customer is justified at being angry, but not at the customer service worker they're speaking to.

Many, many years ago when I was between uni courses, I had a helpdesk job at Telstra (back when such jobs were still done in Australia).

Under Sol Trujillo.

There were many, many anti-consumer decisions made by management.

The internal business systems were a broken mess that regularly had outages.

They were significantly more expensive than other telcos. "Premium products have premium prices" was a phrase used unironically.

There was stuff going on like outbound telemarketing call centres contracted by the company that were illegally signing people up for products they didn't order. The first some knew they were on a $79 a month plan for 24 months was when the Nokia arrived.

There were KPIs on things like adherence to schedule, conformance to rostered hours, and calls per hour.

And they expected 20% of calls, including for tech support or billing, to result in a sale.

It was also incredibly siloed, so one person couldn't resolve an issue alone.

Awful, horrible place to work.

So you'd end up with customers who'd been transferred four or five times and being told different things by different staff.

Complicated edge case issues often fell through the cracks.

Needless to say, customers were justifiably angry.

And the poor wretch who tried to fix the problem for the person who'd just been transferred four times took the brunt of it.

#Telstra #australia #enshittification #customerservice #helpdesk #callcentre #callcenter #techsupport