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An Optus customer has been left shocked after receiving an extremely blunt response when reaching out for help to the telco’s customer service team.
Approximately 10 million customers were left without service for more than nine hours on Wednesday after a fault in the provider’s core network triggered a nationwide outage.
Thousands of businesses were impacted, public transport chaos ensued and Optus customer service representatives were inundated by upset and confused Aussies.
One customer, who reached out to the telco in the wake of the drama, said he received a very unexpected response to a query regarding his mobile phone plan.
The Reddit user, who goes by the username AGuerillaGorilla, posted a screenshot of the conversation he had using Optus’ in-app chat function.
He claimed the company had cancelled his plan, which saw him getting 15GB a month for $30, and signed him up for a new plan.
He said the new plan was significantly more expensive due to the fact it had a “bonus” 70GB of data, though he claimed he “barely uses” the data he was originally paying for.
Unhappy with the change, the man contacted a customer service representative, who informed him that the change was “automatically being actioned”.
The employee said the Reddit user would have received communication prior to the change occurring.
“And you have been given a choice to cancel your plan before the change will occur,” they wrote.
News.com.au understands that, before any changes are made to a customer’s plan, Optus communicates via SMS and email, providing an opportunity for users to contact the company.
But it was the worker’s parting line that really shocked the customer.
“Either you will stay or not,” the customer service representative said.
Alongside the screenshot of the chat, the customer noted: “I get they’d be under the pump, but I didn’t expect that response!”
An Optus spokesperson told news.com.au the company is committed to delivering “transparent and timely customer service when handling complaints”.
“We recognise that, in this specific instance, a customer’s experience didn’t match our standards and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused,” the spokesperson said.
“Our representative will receive feedback and guidance on best practices for effective communication with our customers.”
The post sparked hundreds of comments, with many users less than impressed with the response from the telco.
One branded the reply “unprofessional”, while another said the message was “terrible” but it seemed to “sadly be the standard” now for big companies when it comes to customer service.
Others likened the response to an “ultimatum”, saying they would take the employee up on the offer to cancel the contract.
One person claimed they had a similar experience with Optus on Tuesday after telling them they didn’t want to automatically be changed to a new plan.
“Told them I didn’t want the data and I wanted to be back on my old plan. They could not do that apparently. I said no worries I’ve just found an Aldi mobile sim for half the price. Changed that arvo, just in time for the outage,” they said.
However, there were those who had sympathy for the worker, saying while the response was “pretty sh*t”, they must be dealing with an immense amount of pressure given the outage.
In a wide-ranging interview with news.com.au on Thursday, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin revealed the telco would be apologising for the outage by giving customers access to extra data, with a value of $100, “for a couple of months”.
“We’re going to thank our customers for their patience and loyalty by giving them additional data for a couple of months,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said.
The company’s “bonus data allowance” would mean Optus postpaid mobile customers could use up to 200GB of data, managing director of customer solutions, Matt Williams said.
Business customers would be extended the same offer, he confirmed, in lieu of any cash compensation as has been widely called for.
“For yesterday’s outage, we wanted to give that extra data of 200GB over the next couple of months, which if they were to purchase as a standard add-on would cost in excess of $100,” Mr Williams told news.com.au.
It comes as the CEO admitted that another mass network outage couldn’t be ruled out in the future, saying it could happen again to any big company.
“When you run a critical infrastructure, it’s always a possibility,” she told news.com.au.
“Outages of this magnitude though are a really rare occurrence and it’s our job to keep it that way.
The telco, she said, was designed with multiple layers of “fallback and redundancy”, which at its heart, had a “modern intelligent router network”.
Despite is supposed advanced design, she said a “network event” triggered Wednesday’s catastrophe.
The event caused a “cascading failure that resulted in the shutdown of our services”, she said.
“Our engineers are completing a thorough investigation so that we capture all the learnings and continue to improve,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin.
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