Peter Griffin: Customer service isn't helping things

Theresa Gattung confirmed what we already knew when she naively blurted out to analysts that incumbents such as Telecom use confusion as their "chief marketing tool".

She also spoke sense when she said the big scam was wearing thin, and that greater transparency was needed in deals presented by telecommunications operators.

The move to unbundle Telecom's network will make that transparency all the more important as more advanced services become available.

But it seems some of Gattung's competitors have been reading from the same marketing textbook.

I've long believed that the country's internet providers do a shabby job of phone line customer service. You'd think they would put their best people on the line for new business inquiries, as first impressions count. You'd think the call centre operators would fall over themselves to impress potential customers, spending time figuring out their needs so they can offer the most suitable internet packages.

New research has confirmed that confusion reigns among internet users shopping around for deals among internet providers. And there seems to be little interest by the providers in cutting through that confusion to help people looking to sign for broadband and find the best deal.

Telecom Xtra, Clear.net, Woosh, ihug and Slingshot were the internet providers included in a week-long, 100-call survey by research company Global Reviews, which had people ring the companies and ask about broadband packages, then score the operators' responses according to 150 criteria. The research sought to find out how good the internet providers are at explaining their internet deals to prospective customers.

The only promising statistic to come out of the study is that researchers only had to wait on hold for operators to talk to them about 50 per cent of the time. The other results paint a grim picture.

Only 13 per cent of operators asked open questions such as: "What are you planning to use broadband for?"

And in 20 per cent of conversations, the operator became frustrated with the caller's lack of technical knowledge.

The customers' actual needs were elicited 8 per cent of the time, and in only 9 per cent of calls did operators stop to check whether the caller understood what was being explained.

Over all, Woosh did best, covering 60 per cent of the items on the score- card, which measures everything from phone queue delays to the type of questions asked by operators and their responses to customer queries. Xtra came in second place with 56 per cent, followed by Slingshot with 50 per cent, ihug 48 per cent and Clear.net a pitiful 46 per cent.

"The operators don't seem to be using a needs-based sales process," said Sarah Owen of Global Reviews. "It's disappointing, especially as they all seem to be advertising broadband a lot."

Too much jargon is used by customer service people and damningly, many of the callers who were observed by the research company ended the call more confused than when they began, she says.

Many people are still using dial-up internet connections to get on the web - 835,000 connections last year, according to Sydney-based telecoms analyst Paul Budde.

Most of those people don't know their DSL router from their data cap, and it's up to the internet providers to make it easy for them when they decide to upgrade to broadband. There's no point delivering new and improved broadband services if people are saddled with monthly plans and hardware they don't need or want, and end up just resenting the cost of it all.

I have no problem talking to internet provider sales people and help desk support, because I speak the same language and know when they're leading me up the garden path. But I'm in the minority.

Most people think in terms of what they can do - download video clips or web-stream radio stations - rather than how fast the connection needs to be to do so. The problem is that most internet provider customer service people aren't asking callers what they want to do with broadband.

If consumers are willing to give their business to one of Telecom's competitors, they need to be sure that the toll-calling packages, which some require subscribers to take up to claim a discount, are going to provide value for them. They need to know how much traffic their web activities will chew up so they can avoid over-running their data allowance. It seems like good business sense, but confusion abounds and it's doing nothing to stimulate broadband uptake.

After the drubbing Woosh received in the early days over the quality of its wireless broadband services, it is good to see the internet provider leading the pack in customer service.

In a competitive market it knows it has to win people over on the benefits of connecting wirelessly.

But the industry as a whole has to improve its game, and providing better service on the phone for customers calling cold is the starting point.