A client called and said their email had stopped working, so i went out to see them.
Turns out they were using an email account that was attached to an old business telecom account - the business had shut down about 5 years ago, so i explained how telecom were culling off old email accounts that they thought were not being used any more. It was in a 'suspended' state.
The client found this very difficult to understand that the mailbox was a free service provided with a paid service that he is no longer using, and therefore should not have been using said mailbox for the last 5 years.

So then I thought hold on, you are allowed sub accounts. Why dont we just ring up telecom and ask them to transfer it to one of his 5 free sub accounts that he should get with his home broadband plan.

The CSR explained that they could not do that.
The customer would have to pay $10 per month - ON HIS HOME BROADBAND ACCOUNT to have the extra email address attached to it, and could NOT have the account as a subaccount that he should qualify for.
It was also apparantly impossible for the CSR to terminate the email account and recreate it as a sub account.

So the client who has had three outages over the last 2 weeks (one local to Taradale, a central north island area outage, and this mornings semi national outage) decided he would rather transfer to Now! The outages werent really a problem for him until combined with bad customer service it provoked him to think about switching.
I advised him against this as they dont have a good reputation for reliability but they are offering a good deal at the mometnt. He couldnt understand why telecom would make him pay for a service that they advertise should be free with his account.

He now understands why the old email account was suspended, but could not understand why the CSR could not transfer it to occupy one of his free sub accounts he is entitled to.

The customer did not receive a noice like some of our other clients did a month ago. I checked his deleted items (go back to 2006) and junk folders. The CSR also said he could look up if a notice of suspension was sent but he could not find a record of a notice being sent to this customer.


Anyhow it makes no sense to me, made him angry, and so he has decided to leave telecom.