girl geek adjacent

Some of you may or may not remember my original post which basically was an email I sent to Telecom about a recent broadband outage I suffered. I sent it to a couple of other people as well. And eventually word trickled down to me that my email was being used as an example as how poor customer service can bite you in the bum, or something like that. But anyway, I eventually calmed down and resigned myself to being shafted and the whole experience faded into a distant (jaded) memory.

Today when I got home from work, I had a letter from Telecom in the box. To be perfectly honest, I was expecting it to be a confirmation of a direct debit I had set up, but on opening it didn’t look like a direct debit letter, it looked like another kind of letter. I thought, oh how fantastic, more nonsense about being upgraded to ADSL2+, but alas no, IT WAS AN APOLOGY AND CONTAINED THE WORD SORRY IN THE TITLE. Sorry for yelling, but I am that surprised.

There’s a few sentences in this letter that I find pleasing.

In recent weeks in some parts of the country, we haven’t been able to fix telephone and broadband faults as quickly as we’d like. This is not good enough.

As you read on, you basically get the feeling that they’re trying to blame Visionstream and the recent industrial action as the cause for the delay. If I was a contractor, I would be feeling pretty pissed off about some of the things, but I’m not. I’m a customer, ya know, the customer is always right.

Then further down there’s another part I really like:

We’d like to make it up to you

As you’ve had a fault recently, I apologise on behalf of Telecom New Zealand that you were affected by this situation.

The rest of the letter details criteria for restitution from Telecom, if you remember all I was asking for was one month of broadband charges, well, I have received a credit for my home phone line and my monthly broadband charges. All up, That leaves me with $22 to pay.

Thanks Telecom for coming to the party. It is better late than never I guess and I think congratulations are in order for stepping up and sending out these letters, admitting that things could be better and putting it right with the consumers. Don’t forget us consumers. We pay your salary. I leave the last word of this post to Telecom:

Thank you for bearing with us. We are doing out best to put a bad situatino right, and we never forget who keeps us in business – you, the customer.