TelstraClear does its best to lose my business
Another tale of how telcos do their best to infuriate customers who want to stay with them.
I’ve had an account and 5 users with TelstraClear, my NZ internet service provider, since the earliest days of Clearnet. All of our friends and family, our personal business contacts, banks, utilities, and many other people use them to get in touch with us. So they are very important to us. Two weeks ago TelstraClear was supposed to shift our account from cable broadband to dialup, while we were overseas. Today we lost access to all our usernames and email; which is doubly bad because I also had all my other emails from all my other accounts and domains forwarded to my TelstraClear user account.
I explained our situation to the call centre rep who processed our service request, and she promised to put a reminder in her system to personally check that the change had been actioned correctly. A botched service task is bad enough, so imagine how I felt finding that it hadn’t been done despite having been made that promise.
The web support contact system asked me to set up a new account when I tried to use it to contact TelstraClear today (presumably because my user name was not active). No joy that way. The latest insult: calling from the UK (at my cost of course), I am told that there is at least a 30 minute wait for calls to be answered. At international roaming rates, I don’t think so!
So if anyone from TelstraClear is reading this - get my account fixed pronto!
Meanwhile I can be contacted at Isambard, and I’ve reset all my emails and web stuff to go there (apart from my Clearnet accounts which I can’t get to).
Update: Fixed, thanks to Olof.
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May 20th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
familiar story with Clear, they went to the pack when bought by TelstrClear
we moved away from them a year ago when we moved house and couldn’t take their cable broadband with us … while they didn’t destroy our emails as part of that, they did do it to my father-in-law’s emails who we asked for similar arrangement as you did
best solution I’ve since found = google apps hosted email, with your own domain(s)
can even set it up to retrieve @clear.net.nz emails … it does mine - but you’ll have to wait for yours to reactivate!
May 21st, 2008 at 1:59 am
Jim
1: Try using Skype-out to phone TC rather than a mobile or landline - much cheaper when on hold. I’ve been making “on hold” landline calls here in the US using Skype. No joy with Kiwi 800 number though, so there needs to be a +64 number
2: Now is a good time, and the issues are a great reason, to abandon an ISP as your mail provider.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:07 am
3: Get your act together Telstra Clear!
this must really suck - i hope you get it resolved soon.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:51 am
Thanks guys. I’d already set up isambardgroup.com using Google apps, and my isambardgroup.com email is working fine. Shame I didn’t make it the default for all my private stuff before now. I’ll try Skype tonight,although how it works on a rural mobile broadband link might be questionable.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
As an employee of TelstraClear I sincerely apologize for what has happened. Terminating your cable service should under no circumstances have terminated your dialup and e-mail users. Can you please get in touch with me via e-mail (or phone, see http://olofolsson.com/contact/) and I will follow up on your problem asap. (I will need your account # and the names of the 5 dialup/mail user-ids.)
–Olof
May 21st, 2008 at 10:07 am
[…] TelstraClear does its best to lose my business […]
May 21st, 2008 at 10:09 am
Thanks Olof. All working okay.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Jim, one Google Apps can host multiple domains, mine hosts 3 about to be 4
May 25th, 2008 at 8:25 am
Well done Olof for sorting this issue out for Jim.
Jim, possibly an opportunity to recognise a procative TelstraClear employee for “taking ownership” after reading your blog?
While it’s unfortunate that it came to this, top marks to Olof for his actions.
Ken
May 25th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
The funny thing is I was just thinking this weekend about getting the TCL cable that connects to our house relit after 3 years with another broadband provider but all the bad stuff I’ve heard about TelstraClear in Wgtn continues to put me off. Now I’ve read this and bookmarked Olof’s blog, I’m surprisingly more comfortable with the idea of a new umbilical. It’s weird how dehumanised the telcos have become. Is there a category where we can vote for Olof in the next Telecommunication Awards?
May 26th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
MG, you are making me blush!
Seriously though, I think you have a point in Telco’s easily being perceived as abstract dehumanized entities. Even the comparatively small NZ ones, like Telecom, Vodafone, and TelstraClear. The funny thing is that it is the technologies that we sell–broadband and internet in particular–that could potentially make us appear more approachable and human by allowing more direct and open communication! (Well, I think so at least!)
May 29th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Nice one Olof. I was looking at web traffic stats for your new Clearnet portal today - it’s getting twice the traffic as telstraclear.co.nz since its launch. That’s funny.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
MG: it is early days for the http://clearnet.co.nz/ portal. We have more stuff in the works for the coming months. Also, we have received little publicity to date.
Hopefully the stats will ramp up nicely going forward!