OPINION
Greg Bruce wanted a new phone but didn’t want to have to work for it. Neither, it seemed, did the telcos. Something had to give.
It seemed simple enough: I wanted to find the phone and plan that would suit me best, at the best price.
But, when I began wading through the enormous number of words and numbers Spark, One NZ and 2Degrees have produced to market their various phones and plans, I quickly became confused, frustrated and frankly baffled by the amount of effort I was having to put in.
I wanted to give them lots of money. Why were they making it so hard?
I found myself thinking back to then-Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung’s famous comment from 2006: “What has every telco in the world done in the past? It’s used confusion as its chief marketing tool.”
That comment created a national uproar 18 years ago, so why did it feel more relevant than ever?
If you buy a late model cellphone and commit to staying with one telco for 36 months, which they incentivise you to do, because they know retaining customers is cheaper than acquiring them, you will typically, by the end of that period, have paid them more than $4000.
Don’t you think, I thought, that a company wanting $4000 from you should have to earn that money?
Shouldn’t they chase you, send you personalised offers, gifts and inducements, make you feel important, tell you your articles in the NZ Herald are eminently worthy of winning the national award you’ve just been nominated for?
Why were they not doing any of that?
Why did they not appear to be making any effort at all?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that effort takes time, and time is money, and any money they spend on us is money, they can’t spend on their CEOs.
Having decided against making an effort to woo us, they needed someone else to do it, and, incredibly, they seem to have decided the someone else should be... us.
Even more incredibly, we seem to have accepted it.
Not any more, I thought.
Not on my watch. It was time to call out the ludicrosity of this situation. It was time to take back the power. It was time to email someone.
Just a few of the many factors you need to consider when buying a new phone and plan: technical features you don’t understand, data allowances, data throttling, carryover data, free data hours, multi-plan discounts, hotspots, something called One Wallet, something called Team Up, combos, trade–ins, progressive discounts, bundling, unbundling etc etc.
Even if you know what they’re talking about and have a big brain, the time and effort required to weigh up all these factors and make a rational decision will drastically reduce the time and energy available for doing the things you love, like sitting in Auckland traffic or calling talkback.
Over each of its first three years, a new cellphone costs roughly 2 percent of the average New Zealander’s income. Imagine if Spark or One NZ were planning to spend 2 percent of their income on a single item. How do you think they would expect the supplier of that roughly $40 million item to behave towards them?
All I wanted was for them to treat me the way they would like to be treated - to make me feel like the $4000 I wanted to spend was the large amount of money it is, rather than the trivial amount it is to them.
I decided to shift the burden of work back to where it belonged: on them.
I would produce a document containing a clear and comprehensive outline of my wants and needs for both phone and plan and would then sit back and wait for their offers, inducements and general supplications to make me feel like the important person I have always hoped to become.
I spent a lot of time producing the document, because I hoped it would be the only communication we would need. I called my document a “request for proposal” or “RFP”, because that is a term I’d heard businesspeople use before and I thought it made me sound important.
The RFP began with some boring background information about how I was a long and loyal One NZ customer, although my recent experiences with the company had been sub-optimal, and I was now hoping to get a better phone at a better price, with better service.
I explained that I needed more than my current 4.5gb of data. I explained that as a journalist, I am an increasingly heavy power-user of generative AI and that I can’t afford to be left behind in the AI revolution.
I needed a new phone that allowed me to fulfill this desire. I went on and on.
I went on far too long, but I didn’t want them to be able to accuse me of being vague.
After detailing my requirements, I asked them to provide three things: personalised options, a recommended plan and a detailed pricing breakdown.
All I needed then was an email address to send it to.
I started with Spark. I scoured their website high and low, used well-known search engines and the many research skills I’ve built up over my career as a professional journalist, but if there is an email address on their site, they’ve employed considerable resources to make sure it will never be found.
I presume they want you to contact them by phone, presumably so they can confuse you with lots of numbers and features you can’t hold in your head, and so they don’t have to spend time reading lengthy documents you’ve prepared, which require them to do the sort of research they’d rather outsource to you.
But they were no longer in charge, I thought.
I was, I thought.
I turned to their chatbot, which avoided my straightforward request for an email address by posing various unnecessary questions of its own.
After some annoying back and forth, it finally transferred me to a human, who asked me to elaborate on my question.
I wasn’t sure how to reply to that request, because the question had been: “Can I please get an email address for sales?”
I sat there, trying to figure out which part needed elaboration. By the time I replied, my interrogator had left the chat.
They were replaced by someone who, instead of replying to my question, told me they would be happy to share Spark’s mobile plans over chat.
I thanked them for that, but reiterated that all I needed was an email address.
They asked what I needed, specifically. I wrote: “An email address”.
It took half an hour and 24 messages, involving three people and one AI, and far too many repetitions of the phrase “an email address”, but finally they capitulated and gave me their email address.
I had worn them down. I had moved one step closer to forcing them to accept several thousand dollars.
I quickly discovered Spark was unique neither in its email avoidance nor its general apathy. Having failed to find an email address on the 2Degrees website, I typed into an online contact form: “I have an RFP I would like to email you. I need an email address to send it to”.
The reply took eight hours and the person writing it suggested that if I wanted to buy a phone, I should either phone them or visit a 2Degrees store.
Ignoring their suggestion, as they had ignored mine, I hit reply, cut and pasted my RFP, hit send, then sat back and waited.
Two thirds of New Zealand’s big three telcos were now, I wrongly assumed, hard at work seeking to do whatever it took to get my business.
The last one, I wrongly assumed, would be far easier.
As already mentioned, I am a long and loyal One NZ customer and although my customer service interactions with it in recent years have been terrible, it has recently been through a very public exercise trying to improve.
Unable, of course, to find an email address on its website, I turned to its chatbot.
I told it I wanted an email address.
Instead of answers, it replied with questions: What’s my name? What’s my email address?
Is my interest in business or personal services? Is my interest in cellphone or broadband services? What do I need help with?
I sighed. I wrote, again, that I wanted an email address for sales.
It replied: “Your message doesn’t match an item on the list”.
There was a kind of pathetic beauty in its incompetence.
The fact it answered my request for its email by asking for mine was such perfect trolling that I wondered for a moment if I was talking not with a chatbot, but a sociopath with quite a good sense of humour.
I replied: “I just want your email address for sales. Please give that to me and we can be done here”.
It replied: “Hmmm. I didn’t recognise your email. Try entering it again, or type stop to cancel”.
I typed ‘s-t-o-p’.
It replied: “Okay, I’ll stop looking for a human. You can keep chatting with me”.
I felt a sudden, almost overwhelming desire not just to cancel my One NZ plan and cut all ties with the company but to throw my iPhone 8 from a tall building and into the path of a heavy military vehicle, and I may have done so, had I not felt such a strong desire to use it to call a mental health professional.
In retrospect, knowing what lay ahead of me over the coming days and weeks, I should have gone with my gut.
2Degrees were the first to reply to my RFP. Although they failed to provide personalised options and total cost as requested, they at least attempted to engage with the document. I wrote back asking for clarification, but when I eventually received a reply, it came from a different person and read as follows:
“Please click here to find the plan and phone price per month. Price will be varied depending upon what size u select 256gb, 512gb, 1Tb.”
They concluded by suggesting that, if I needed more help, I phone their friendly team.
I did need more help, but I didn’t want to phone their friendly team and I certainly didn’t want to click on another link.
I wrote: “I don’t want to go clicking around websites looking at various options - I just want you to give me the best available deal according to my needs, which I have made quite clear in the RFP. If you are unable to do this, then I will go elsewhere”.
This was, of course, an empty threat, and I suspect they knew it. In the desert of telecommunications customer service, it was becoming increasingly clear, there was no “elsewhere”.
Eventually, a different 2Degrees representative wrote to me, apologising for their colleague’s response and providing a relatively good reply.
Of course, “relatively” in this context is not high praise, and the whole experience had fallen so far short of satisfactory that it would have been too little, too late, had there been another telco in New Zealand that wanted to sell me a phone.
Eventually, I heard back from Spark. Their response was also missing several key pieces of information, so I sent a follow-up, but never heard back.
I returned to the company’s chatbot. It eventually assured me it would find a human as soon as possible. An hour later, it apologised for the delay and again assured me I would be connected as soon as possible, and, 17 hours later, I was.
That human did a pretty good job. That it had taken six days to get to that point was not their fault.
Back at One NZ, my seemingly interminable exchange with the chatbot had finally concluded with its acquiescence to my request for a human.
The human asked how they could help.
I told them I would like an email address.
“Sure, I can help,” they wrote.
“Great,” I replied.
They asked what my request was about.
“A personal cellphone plan,” I wrote.
“Please help me with your mobile number,” they replied.
“No thank you,” I wrote. “I just want an email address. Thanks.”
“Just to confirm your query: you are looking to get a mobile plan?” they wrote.
“Yes,” I replied.
They informed me that there was no specific email address for my request, but kindly provided me their own.
I emailed them but received no reply, so the next day I sent a follow-up.
Again, there was no reply. Again I returned to the chatbot.
Again, I went through the preliminaries and was connected to a customer service person. Again, I asked for an email address and was told there wasn’t one.
Again the service person provided me their own.
“Is there no sales department?” I asked.
“I am from sales department,” they replied.
I emailed them but received no reply, so the next day I sent a follow-up: “Hello again, Just wanted to see if you’ve had a chance to review my request. I’ve already received responses from all other telcos, so just waiting to hear from you before making a decision”.
Again, no reply. Again, I returned to the chatbot.
On being connected to another human, I told them I’d like an email address to send my RFP to.
“Apologies I didn’t understand that,” they wrote. “Is this for business?”
“No,” I wrote. “Personal use.”
“And are you purchasing something?” they asked. “Because we need documents only for monthly plans.”
Unlike my previous correspondents, they provided a company email address - nzconsumer.support@one.nz - which sounded perfect, but when I emailed it, I received an auto reply saying the address was not monitored.
The auto reply contained a link, which, when clicked on, took me to a web page that provided a link back to the chatbot.
I was so tired. I again went through the preliminaries with the chatbot.
I again reached a human who again asked how they could help. I said I wanted an email address.
They assured me they would help. I tried to believe them. They asked for my full name and mobile number.
“I just need an email address,” I replied.
“I will surely give you a email,” they replied. “But will need to verify.”
I had fought hard over several days to keep my mood and demeanour calm and even, but I was rapidly running out of fight.
“I have already sent this three times to three different people at One NZ,” I wrote.
“Frankly I am exhausted. I did not have any such problem with Spark or 2Degrees. Considering I am a long and loyal One NZ customer, this is astonishing to me.”
They replied: “Can you please elaborate why you want to share the documents?”
“NO I CANNOT! I HAVE NO ELABORATIONS LEFT TO GIVE! FOR MANY DAYS NOW, I HAVE PROVIDED ELABORATIONS. ALL I WANT IS FOR SOMEONE TO READ MY CAREFULLY WRITTEN, COMPREHENSIVE RFP AND OFFER ME A CELLPHONE!!! PREFERABLY AT A PRICE LOW ENOUGH THAT I WILL BE ABLE TO AFFORD INTENSIVE AND ONGOING CARE FOR THE VARIOUS MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES THIS PROCESS HAS CAUSED ME.”
In an admirable show of restraint I struggle to explain even now, I did not write the above.
Instead, I replied: “It outlines what kind of cellphone plan and device and features I want”.
“I am sorry,” they wrote, “but we don’t provide that information on email.”
I took a deep breath. I took another deep breath. I believe now that I was probably hyperventilating.
“Can you please escalate this?” I wrote.
They replied: “If you want, I can help you with this”.
I did want. I very much did want. But I had already spent so much time and energy trying and failing to make that clear to so many different people and non-people, I could not believe them.
I replied: “I would like to chat with a manager”.
They wrote: “I am sorry manager is not available over chat, please call us on 777”.
I wrote: “I do not want to call. I have already emailed this document three times. I just want someone to reply to me”.
They wrote: “May I know when you emailed the documents?”
The psychological pain was by now acute.
I began to wonder about possible flow-on physical effects. I fantasised about a short hospital stay, preferably under heavy sedation.
But they had asked a question, and I felt compelled to answer. I trawled through my previous communications, real and virtual, and responded with the information they sought.
When I had completed this labour on their behalf, I added: “I think you can probably understand my frustration when all I want is an email address”.
They replied: “If you need plan details, you can contact our sales team.”
At this point, I think it’s important to note the things I didn’t do.
I didn’t say that I had already spent several days trying to contact their sales team, while being thwarted at every turn.
I didn’t cry tears of desperation and frustration.
I didn’t strike my head repeatedly against my keyboard and monitor.
Instead, as I had done so many times already, I asked for an email address.
“I am sorry,” they replied.
“Sales team doesn’t have any email. The only email where you can share the documents is the one on which you already shared.”
By this, they meant the aforementioned and ironically named nzconsumer.support@one.nz, which I had already written to, which had replied to me telling me it was not monitored, which had directed me back to the chatbot, which had directed me to this human, who was directing me back to nzconsumer.support@one.nz, which would direct me...
And so on. It would have been funny, were it not so very unfunny.
I felt like I was being gaslit by the sales process of one of New Zealand’s largest companies.
I felt like I was trapped in an escape room from which there was no escape, even though I was offering $4000 to anyone willing to make me one.
I wrote: “The sales team don’t have email? Is that because I have accidentally travelled back in time to 1975?”
“We don’t have a dedicated sales team on email,” they wrote.
“We do have sales team on chat.”
“Are we not on chat?” I wrote, believing it entirely possible that we weren’t, that I was imagining this whole thing, that I was dreaming, that I had drifted somewhere far, far away from reality.
In many ways, that would have made more sense.
“Yes we are,” they wrote, “but do you want to get connected with sales team? I am from billing team”.
I wrote that I would indeed like to be connected to the sales team.
“May I know your full name and mobile number?” they asked.
I replied that they didn’t need that information in order to transfer me to sales.
“I can’t transfer without verification,” they wrote.
“That makes no sense,’’ I wrote. “I am not coming to you as a customer. I don’t need help with my account. Neither Spark nor 2Degrees needed verification. I guess I’ll just disconnect and reconnect and have another chat with someone different?”
When they didn’t reply, I wrote “Yes?”
When they didn’t reply to that, I wrote: “Would you suggest I do that?”
When they didn’t reply to that, I wrote: “Are you still there?”
They were not. Had they ever been?
That should have been the end of both my interaction and multiple-decade relationship with One NZ, and it would have been, were I just a regular customer. That would have been sweet relief. But I felt a moral obligation to bring this whole sorry situation to a conclusion, which, I hoped would lead to some sort of reckoning, which I hoped would help ensure no one else need suffer as I had.
Stifling my gag reflex, I returned again to the chatbot, which eventually connected me with someone whose name sounded familiar.
“Hello,” I wrote. “I believe we may have chatted last week. If it was you, I sent you a document with my needs for a personal cellphone plan. But I have not received a response.”
“Yes,” they replied. “That email I have send it to my supervisor and lately they have been into some work and couldn’t able to replay.”
“Could you follow up with them,” I wrote... “because that is six days ago.”
They offered to send me their team leader’s email. They told me they were already in touch with their team leader about my email.
They told me they’d forward my email. They told me they’d let me know ASAP once they’d had a reply from their team leader.
I asked when I could expect to hear back.
They wrote: “I cannot assure you the timing but as soon as they have received and read the email they will get back to me.”
When I hadn’t heard back by the next day, I wrote a follow-up. I never heard from them or their team leader.
I found a feedback form on the One NZ site and typed into it a summary of my interactions over the preceding week. I included the full text of my RFP. I wrote that this was now the fourth time I had supplied the RFP to the company over the past seven days. I wrote that Spark and 2Degrees had both replied to the same RFP long ago. I wrote that this was astonishing to me, given my loyalty to One NZ over many years. I wrote that I looked forward to hearing back from someone.
I received an auto reply reading: “Thank you for your message. We’ll aim to respond to you within the next 24 hours”.
I also received two emails. One read, in part, “our incredible NZ team will be in touch within 24 hours”. Another read: “I’ve opened your case and a member of my team will look into it soon. There’s nothing you need to do”.
Both emails included an official looking case number, which made me think, naively, that they were taking the situation seriously.
When I hadn’t heard anything after 24 hours, I replied to one of the emails: “Just wondering if there has been any progress on this”.
I received no reply that day, nor the following day, nor the day after that.
I began to suspect One NZ’s sales and service team were a figment of my increasingly disturbed mind, so I was shocked when - a full seven days after I had been promised a response within 24 hours - I received the following email from someone describing themselves as “Customer Champion Coach”. I quote it here in full:
“Apologies for the delay getting back to you. Our $45 Small Endless plan has 5GB of max speed data, then speeds reduce to 1.2Mbps which could be suitable for you. If you would like to change to this plan or one of our other Pay Monthly plans, you can do so by going to the following link and clicking on ‘Build My Plan’ and following the steps.”
I did not go to the link. I did not click on “Build My Plan”. I did not follow the steps.
Seven days later, I received another email. I quote it here in full:
“Kia ora, we have now closed your case. If you require additional assistance, please get back in touch with us by replying to this email directly.”
I sat there for some time, staring at those words. I thought about the additional assistance I required. I thought about the likelihood I would get it from One NZ.
It did not take long. I did not reply.
Post-script: I outlined my experience to my current service provider, One NZ, and received this response, from SME & Consumer Director, Chris Fletcher:
“We’re committed to improving our customer service and I’m gutted this was the experience you received. While not an excuse, and instead explanation, we have just finished moving our call centres to a new partner, and unfortunately this was when you were sending your RFP.
“If customers don’t want to come into store, we recommend calling us so we can provide quicker and more tailored service. We’re the first, and to our knowledge, the only big telco, publishing daily service metrics on our website. On Tuesday for example, we helped 5,411 customers through our inbound call queues. On average, customers waited 26 seconds to speak to us, and 3 per cent of callers ended the call before it was answered. In March, 80 per cent of customers told us we fixed their issue on the call.
“But we know digital solutions are increasingly important, and chatbots aren’t developing fast enough as customer expectations rise. So we’re investing in more training for our digital and human assistants, plus AI and other tech.
“One NZ has been awarded the best mobile network for two years running, and next time you want to buy a phone via RFP, we want One NZ to be the best in terms of service too. Hopefully, you’ll stay a customer long enough for us to prove that to you.”