Your client facing web-based systems are not properly thought out, poorly designed (if there’s any design at all), untested, and, to be perfectly honest, just plain crap. How you permit this sort of crap to go your clients’ front line, in the 21st century, is a scandal. You should be ashamed: these sorts of fundamental failures on your part are of such a basic nature, that your IT (lack of) management needs to be seriously reamed a new set of ….

Let’s start with last month’s effort: I needed to activate a new service, and port a number across from another carrier. Simple task, right? Well, yes, unless you want to use Telstra’s systems.

For some reason, in order to port a number across, you need to call one of their perma-hold call centres. And speak with somebody who has very little English comprehension skills; their skills in the Australian dialects of English are non-existent.

Or they would have been, had you been able to actually call the designated number. Sadly, the number that Telstra offered on their website – remember, we are talking about porting a number into Telstra, so the number, by definition, must not yet be carried by them – was only able to be called from a Telstra service.

So, that was a no go scenario.

STUPID, STUPID, STUPID, STUPID, STUPID.

Ok, it took a couple of hours – not everybody at Telstra seemed to get the point that in order to port a number TO Telstra, you would, in all likelihood, not be calling them from a Telstra service – but once we hammered that point home, the issue was resolved, and the new service activated.

That was a month ago.

Exactly.

This weekend, we’ve needed to engage with Telstra with three different transactions. More, actually, but let’s leave it at three for now, and for simplicity.

1: A friend needed to get a new phone service. On my recommendation, she visited the Telstra store in Crown St Wollongong, to acquire at $30 SIM for a new phone service.

I have a particular aversion to poor service, and in particular, to the very poorly named “service” that is foisted upon us by the telcos, in the name of off-shore call centres.

But that sort of thing pales into insignificance when you’re left standing, like a shag on a rock, in a Telstra retail store, for 20 minutes, while the staff are just talking amongst themselves, leaving customers unattended to. Ok, my friend was not buying a shiny new iPhone, but that should not matter.

Not ever.

It was only when she mentioned her discomfort at being made to wait for such a long time, and that she would head to Optus, that some service magically started to arrive.

Sorry, but that is totally unacceptable performance, Telstra.

2: Associated with my new phone service – the one that I couldn’t port across a month ago – I now needed to refresh the prepaid account. What I wanted to do was to enter my credit card details, and then schedule automatic payments, as the service account’s balance ran dry.

Easy, right?

Well, no. Not exactly.

I was able to find the part on Telstra’s web page that said it was pointing me to where I could schedule payments. It let me enter my credit card details. I needed to nominate a PIN to enable easy access to that credit card.

But wen it came time to specifying how much to pay, and when to pay it … nothing.

Not a scrap of information; no data, no clues.

I was left to manually pay the account, but from what I can tell, automatic scheduled payments are a fantasy; a figment of my imagination.

This of course reflects perfectly the initial – and totally unacceptable – online experience I’d had in trying to port the phone number to Telstra.

3: We now return to my friend: Telstra’s brand new customer. We wanted to register her phone service in their online system, so that she could readily access her balance etc. At some point in the future we’d also like to schedule automatic payments, but see point 2 above for that debacle.

So, we went to Telstra’s online register your phone service page. The first thing requested is the existing account number, or click to enter your prepaid service number. We clicked, and entered the service number.

The form then asked for further details: name (first and last) date of birth, and email address. All basic stuff; all correctly entered. Upon pressing the “Next” button, we were directed to a screen that informed us that we should wait for a validation PIN that was being sent to the phone. When that arrived, we entered it, and pressed the “next” button.

Only to be returned to screen 1. A blank screen 1.

Start again; repeat the process.

With the same outcome.

We then went through a process whereby we were not sent to the second screen for several attempts, before finally getting through to the second screen, entering the PIN …. and once more being sent to a blank screen 1.

Telstra, this is not a good system.

It is not a workable system.

It is not a user friendly system.

It is a total waste of your clients’ time and resources.

It is an insult to your clients to expect them to use these poorly designed, and clearly untested, systems.

There is simply no excuse for this level of unacceptable performance on your part. I will not describe to you the words that my friend – a new customer of your’s, with just two days’ experience and absolutely no good things to report – used in describing her disappointment.

It’s about time that you grew up. That you learned a little about web development. About software development. And about software testing.

Clearly, this is uncharted territory for you, and for that, you should be ashamed.

You should be bloody well ashamed.