Still at it...

When I did my Swamp newsletters years ago, one of them was about Telstra's business practices.

Looking over an ABC Online forum this morning, I found this little entry concerning Telstra call centres...

Well done!! A very accurate portrayal of the evironment with the Telstra Call Centre. I worked for Telstra for the last 7 years before being made redundant at the end of last year and most of that time I was in a Call Centre. My sincerest sympathy goes out to the families who lost thier loved ones.

It is generally the people who take pride in the standard of thier work who suffer the most in this enviroment. If you really do want to help people and are not motivated by the buck but really want to provide good customer service then it is a real challenge to stay sane in this organisation. In saying that there are still may wonderful people still there raising these matters with management on a day to day basis who are still fighting to be heard.

It may suprise most customers but it is generally the consultants in the Call Centres and the staff in contact with customers on a day to day basis who fight the hardest for customers rights! They are the ones who will generally have to listen to the complaints so believe me when I say, if the company makes a decission that they beielve will not be recieved well by the customer they fight hard for you.

While Mr Rolland makes the point that there has to be measures that are required for scheduling, which is necessary, however, it is how these measures are put in place that makes the difference. You are expected address the customers initial enquiry and then look for opportunities to up sell or cross sell to every customer, and do all of this in an average of 300- 600 seconds or there abouts. This does does not leave a lot of time for customer service. If this time frame was increased then it would mean that you would need MORE staff to answer the amount of calls that they anticipate at any given time, which is why they do not want to increase this target.

Inevitably, this means that a consultant will hurry through the basics of your call, try and sell you something and then get you off the phone. If your initial enquiry is too difficult then they will "transfer you to another area" rather then get stuck with a complex enquiry and move on the next sale. Then someone else has to take then call that has just been transferred. It's called the Telstra Two step. In my expereince, most customers just want their enquiry dealth with efficently and to have it done right the first time. If the managers would realise this, there may not be so many mistakes and therfore there would be less phones calls to deal with when people have to ring back 3 or 4 times toget something fixed. And the more angry and frustrated a customer is the longer the call is going to take!

While the internal message is Customer first, all of the targets and incentives are sales based and sales focused and there is very little recognition for customer service. Generally the people who really do want to help people and provide excellent customer service are the o

I don't know what the rest of this was going to say, but I just wanted to add that Telstra's call centres include a "Retention" department, a department designed to keep disaffected subscribers from moving to other companies. It's the role of Retention to (obviously) churn them back to Telstra during the mandatory cooling off period.

In my time at Dodo Internet, home of the very worst customer service ever, the Retention department was bigger than the sales department - who were all expected to meet or exceed their sales targets. Seems to me that if they paid more attention to providing customer service, they wouldn't need to spend nearly as much trying to keep customers who want to leave for greener pastures.

Another one bites the dust.

Darryl the fat pedo scumbag in Adelaide's southern suburbs got arrested this week and has had his computer seized.

Sux to be you, Darryl. Become an hero? It's really not as bad as you think.

Despite the Sunday Mail having had the story in its pipeline for only a couple of weeks, it's one on which I've been working since late last year. We got him booted out of his SNS and that would have been an end of it except for the fact he came back and one of the kids found him and then I found him.

It didn't take all that long to find "evidence" on one site but it wasn't good enough. It was only by watching and following his comments that we managed to get his msn and from there, his membership of 4 networking sites which led to his arrest this week.

One of the kids got him to tell us when he'd be returning from a holiday in New Zealand too so it was a nice welcome home - for us anyway. lol

This story was especially pleasing because one of my haters alerted Darryl to the page I made for him on my website. He deleted 2 of the accounts I put up in there but his other two accounts are still active. That kinda tells me that he didn't think my reach would extend into his offline world. I have every confidence in the ability of police to retrieve any information he might have tried to delete from his hard drive too.

And I'll be watching his other profiles to see if they mysteriously disappear or have info added to them to the affect that he's been busted.

I really just hope he kills himself while he's out on bail. It's been known to happen in the past and word of his arrest and the reasons for it are bound to get around his football club and tennis club and elsewhere which should deprive him of all his support networks. Becoming an hero would be in his best interests.

He's out on bail, that means he's very unlikely to get a custodial sentence if the police press charges and he's convicted. But I'm not finished with Darryl yet.

The kid who put me on his trail was only 13 at the time. Justice in South Australia might determine his debt to South Australians but I'm not South Australian and neither is that 13yo.

Det-Sgt Peter Rodney of the South Australian Sexual Crime Investigation Branch may be in receipt of more information on Darryl before this gets to court if I have anything to do with it.

Remember SoClear?

No, it's not the Church of Scientology's latest skin care package, it's a worldwide pedo information exchange on Yahoo. They have a creepy beyond belief channel on YouTube that makes this writer feel like switching YouTube off. (Even though I never clicked on even one of Bong's links.)

Well, it looks like they've got their own messageboard now - called SoFightBack.

It started this week by the look of it, has only 5 members and 3 posts so far, but one of those members is ELP.

EVERYONE in the anti-pedo community should know who ELP is. He's almost as much part and parcel of that crowd as was DLW who got jailed late last year.

Having just looked over the Wikisposure page, I noticed neither of those two creeps has a listing.

Come on Pee-J, I thought you were the best in the world. Maybe I got that wrong and the only kids you care about are American kids.

Fancy that because DLW is VERY famous. He was one of the first to bitch about Justin Berry turning state's evidence (laying all the blame on Justin of course - DLW is a pedophile, therefore he's as cowardly as they all are).

That's David Williams, the pedo maggot scumbag.

Not so chipper now, are you David.

Cunt.

Wish I could remember who put that arrest on the board.

Anyway, in other news, the Australian Federal Police rang me from Canberra on Wednesday about a report I filed in the UK about a month ago.

The hardest part of reporting stuff you've seen happening to other people's kids is that without the incident being reported by the kids themselves, there's not a hell of a lot to go on. And when the kids won't even talk to their parents about what's happened, what hope is there of getting them to talk to police?

This one affects me personally because the kid did so much to improve the situation - didn't just sit there being a victim, didn't just 'let things take their course and deal with it as best you can'. This was one brave kid who just doesn't happen to have parental backing when it comes to taking the steps vital to prevent the same thing from happening to other kids.

My crew and I are also in touch with CEOP for a manual on the best way to secure the arrest of online predators. This is where my crew differ from Pee-J. My crew aren't just trained adults. They're fairly savvy adults and they're kids from 14 - 17 who are turning the tables on perverted filthbags by KNOWING WHAT TO DO WHEN A PERVERT STARTS A CHAT.

Yes, that's right. Perverts don't just mistakenly chat to undercover Pee-J operatives, perverts actually chat to real kids as well. The standard advice is "block them, delete them, report abuse."

Erm, pardon me but fuck off.

The kids in my crew are fed to the back teeth of that kind of 'action' and they're so fed up with perverts hitting on them they want to take active steps to prevent it. The stupid 1950's patriarchal attitude goes something along the lines of "This is no job for a kid, let an adult take care of it."

But what happens when a kid hands it over to an adult?

Bloody nothing of course, because the adults have bugger all idea what to do about it either. So, I've got a bunch of people - including kids - who WANT to take action so by Christ I'm going to do whatever I can to make sure if or when the time comes, they know exactly what to do in order to maximise the possibility of getting a pervert arrested.

Oh... Sorry Phillip, that's the non-American way of doing business on the internet. You don't wait for the nursemaid to clean up, you learn to clean up for yourself.