Tatham Oddie

Update 1, 1:20pm: I’m moving to Internode. After consulting with Twitter, @corneliu and @DavidBurela both suggested Internode. @snagy suggested a T1 complain with the communications ombudsman. iiNet – you will be hearing from me soon to start processing my cancellations. Don’t even dare charging me for the last 6 weeks of anti-service.

Update 2, 3:55pm: After emailing this link to the iiNet MD, I rather quickly got a phone call. Lets see how this gets handled … I’ll keep you all posted.

Update 3, 6:05pm: Telstra tech booked to investigate Exchange problem. Target resolution date is tomorrow. Although apparently there’s also a major disruption at the moment that could delay my resolution.

Update 4, 9:24am next morning: Internet resolved. Turns out the MD had passed my request to the “Business Improvement Team”. They said that they’ve read the points below and will take them onboard in their next monthly review cycle. I genuinely tried all the proper channels, but when that failed I changed tact. Never underestimate the power of Twitter, a blog and the odd email to an MD.

I’ve been a passionate iiNet customer for 2.5 years now. I’ve paid almost $12,000 across my multiple contracts, and recommended them to countless customers. (I signed another one up just last fortnight.)

Unfortunately, they have quickly become just another character in the tale of organisations that failed to scale. Nobody cares anymore. Nobody listens. This used to be what they were great at.

In the six weeks since I moved in to my apartment I’ve had 1 week of internet.

I acknowledge that ADSL is a flakey technology at the best of times, but the one month rigmarole to get connected could have definitely happened faster. This was a one-off pain though, so that I accepted.

A week after getting up and running I lost line sync at 10:50am on the 17th May. That’s 10 days ago now.

We have agreed that it’s not my modem – I’ve tried two. We have agreed that it’s not a problem between my wall socket and my MDF – that was inspected during the first internet hiatus. We have agreed that it’s not a problem between my MDF and the exchange – through a combination of Vision Stream and Telstra we also resolved this during the first internet hiatus. Finally, we agreed that the problem is my with DSLAM port at the exchange.

You’d think with all this information they could have fixed this by now.

Their engineers did go out an investigate the problem, and fixed something. They then closed the fault. Did anybody call me to check if it was actually resolved? No. Was it actually resolved? No.

My fault has now been lodged four unique times. I have four different fault reference numbers. I have had to explain my problem eight times now to eight different CSRs (Customer Service Reps).

From an organisational perspective, this could be solved relatively easily:

1. Introduce a new state of “Complete – Awaiting Verification”. This does not mean “Closed”.
2. Send customers and SMS when their fault enters the “Complete – Awaiting Verification” state. A message like, “Your fault, 44564172 is now complete but waiting verification. Please call 13 22 58 within 24 hours if your problem continues.”
3. Introduce a new state of “Reopened – Resolution Denied”.
4. If a customer responds to the SMS to say that they are still experiencing the problem, move the fault to “Reopened – Resolution Denied” instead of opening a brand new fault.
5. If customers do not reply within 24 hours, allow the fault to automatically progress from “Complete – Awaiting Verification” to “Closed”.
6. Prioritise the fault resolution queue by lodgment date. This means that if a fault is reopened 5 days after it was lodged, it is still considered to be 5 days old. The current processes consider it as a new fault and prioritise it accordingly (ie. not at all).

If my fourth fault is once again closed without actually being fixed, it will be time for me to say goodbye to iiNet. So long, and thanks for all the fish.