Now's not good for TelstraClear

Consumer NZ survey supervisor Bev Frederikson said TelstraClear's waiting times were 'appalling'. Photo / Dean Purcell

If you're a TelstraClear customer looking for assistance with your internet account it probably pays to be patient.

A snapshot survey conducted by the Weekend Herald, which involved timing how long it took 10 of the country's internet service providers to provide human support, has uncovered some alarming waits.

Of all the ISPs, TelstraClear proved the most inefficient.

During the first round of calls about midday on Tuesday, it took 30m 44s for a human voice to answer a call.

And on Thursday night, during round two, an automated answer service hung up on two occasions (after 1m 45s waits), saying:

"All of our technical support representatives are busy dealing with other customers at this time, please try again later" before giving a reminder that the technical support hours were from 7am till 11pm weekdays. It was 6.38pm.

Callers were met with a greeting: "Due to an outage earlier today, many customers may find they have no internet service," followed by advice to turn off computers and turn them on again.

During a third attempt to contact the company less than an hour later, the answerphone system twice had trouble recognising the number 2 when it was selected as a menu option.

After the button was pressed for a third attempt, the automatic voice recognition system then forced the caller to repeat the phrase "Help with the internet" for assistance.

It took 2m 30s before the nearly hour-long wait for human contact began, with hold-music including instrumental versions of Tears in Heaven and Never Gonna Dance Again.

To its credit, TelstraClear warned on both occasions that the longest waiting calls were 36 and 65 minutes.

Both calls were answered faster than warned - the first took 30m 44s when the warning was 36m and the second took 58m 8s when the warning was 65 - perhaps because some frustrated customers hung up.

But it wasn't all bad.

Some providers, including rural provider Farmside which services 11,000 broadband customers nationwide, answered calls in as little as 2s, with calls sent straight through to human help.

Consumer NZ survey supervisor Bev Frederikson said TelstraClear's waiting times were "appalling".

She said the waiting times uncovered by the Weekend Herald were reflected in comments made by customers when she carried out a survey of internet providers last November.

In response, a TelstraClear spokesman said: "We are concerned about the time it can take to answer our customers' calls. We are aware of the issue and are in the midst of a project to determine how we improve our service and response times."

The company had been struggling with hardware faults on the days of the survey.

"These made wait times worse than usual. However wait times are still longer than we think they should be - hence our project to address the issue."