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.
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.
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.
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.
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.