My parents have used Telstra for over a decade, so I thought, surely they're not too bad right? Well, a business I do contract IT work for uses Telstra for their internet and their VoIP phones. They have a digitalbusiness account and multiple Yealink T54W which have Telstra's firmware installed. Initially, it seemed okay, the online portal worked, even if it seemed dated, and the phones were set up almost without help. However, despite following the provided instructions, we did have to contact their very slow support to get them all online. So, great. We got VoIP phones which help them run their business. Since they, they've purchased 3 more phones. These new phones were to share the existing lines and again, following the provided instructions were set up. They've been set up for more than a month now but they will not register with Telstra's VoIP service despite multiple resets and I'm currently on my 3rd attempt of getting in touch with support that can help me. The CallConductor portal provided by Telstra has entirely stopped working and I waited 3 full hours to even begin troubleshooting with Telstra's support. They are really slow. Even once I've begun troubleshooting, they seem unfocused and often don't initially understand what it is that needs fixing. Specifically, when explaining that their portal was sending me around in circles asking for a new email for setup as a recovery email, they suggested I call a number for set up of my digitalbusiness account, the one that has already been set up and used for at least a month without issue. When I explained as such, I was again told that the number provided will help me get the correct details for CallConductor, which I already have. The business I'm helping has previously waitied on hold for an entire 2 hours only to be hung up on. Products for businesses are generally meant to make them money, this is costing them hours of employee time for a problem that could likely be solved by reducing the opacity of the software that makes it work and spending some actual money on Customer Support. I cannot stress this enough. Customer support is slow and feels entirely useless. For a business, that is a terrible way to sell a product with an ongoing contract like their DigitalBusiness VoIP service. Even for individual consumers, their service is useless. I set up my parents' internet at a new house they had purchased and this place had nbn HFC. That meant a cable essentially the same as paid digital TV and a converter box into a regular modem. During this time, we had to disconnect and reconnect this service through renovations and we were relentlessly contacted about how our service was dropping out and they would like to send out a contractor to ensure setup has been done correctly. This was prior to the end of our renovations and so even the contractor had trouble making sense of the cabling. They, however, had no trouble observing that their was no problem with our service and they promptly left after we explained that. They sent out a contractor at their own cost for a problem that didn't exist despite us trying our best to communicate that to Telstra's support. Now, nbn's HFC isn't entirely reliable and that's no fault of Telstra. It was also originally $60 a month for nbn 50/20 using it and that's not exactly cheap if you live in a well serviced place in the US but fine for a family that only really streams video. Fine, whatever, $60 is about market rate, no complaints there. Years later, you know, after the technology that makes internet function has had relatively ages to mature and to reduce in cost, they upped the cost of service to $90 a month. $90 a month for one of the most common nbn services available. I get measurably 20 times the data rate they were getting at only 1.5 times the cost of that. I do not understand why Telstra is as big as a company as they are. With as many customers as they must have, they should understand that customer service is the only thing that keeps them and I am stunned at how utterly dysfunctional their team is. There are so many services that do this better at competitive prices that sticking with them makes no sense. Do not ever use them if you're a small business and you need VoIP. Just get a 3CX system through c2comm, the setup is honestly no more complex and much more transparent. Many similar services including them also offer transfer of existing phone numbers so as to minimise the need to update customers of the change. Telstra's customer support is functionally non-existent and the fact that it has been like this for so long shows they do not care.
