Telecom lost a customer today

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Telecom lost a customer today

raytaylor

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#112221 1-Dec-2012 00:50

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.

Ray Taylor

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Klipspringer

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#725383 1-Dec-2012 07:21

raytaylor:
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 are you saying that they will allow it only if he pays $10 per month? Or can't they do it at all?

If so, I think the cost is a bit ridiculous for just an email address. But then again its a service that telecom is supplying. WHat about asking them to just setting up email forwarding for that account? Surely that can't warrant $10 per month.

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plambrechtsen

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#725391 1-Dec-2012 08:34

It's sad you didn't try and contact me when you were having the issue.

It's not normally a standard operation due to how Yahoo run their sub-accounts to transfer a primary account to a sub account.. It can be done by doing some non-trivial tweaking in the background over a few days (long long story!).

If you do want this done feel free to email me pl at telecom dot co dot nz with the account details and I am sure we can get this done.

freitasm

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#725395 1-Dec-2012 08:42

Apart from the comments above, there's a good (security) reason to not allow people to call in, get an email address disabled and then have the same address recreated in another account.

It would be quite easy for a scammer to call in, get a target's email address disabled, transferred to another account and then use it to receive the target's reset password emails for example.

Also none of the existing "subscriptions" and spam emails would know that email account now has a new owner - and the address would be instantly loaded with stuff the new owner doesn't want.

Even if the caller is the owner, there are smaller problems of privacy, such as divorced couples. If the email was the wife's personal use and the couple now is no longer, would you be happy for the ex-husband to takeover the address with full access?

These are just a couple of examples that show emails are very personal and simply claiming rights over an address with an ISP is not enough reason to have access to it.

In this case, seeing this could be the owner (and indeed the person who's been using it for years) then things are a bit different, but seriously moving emails between accounts is a security risk.

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raytaylor

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#725403 1-Dec-2012 09:05

Braii - yes they wanted to charge a monthly fee for the transfered the email account

Plam - shall check with the client on Monday

Freit - You raise a good point about the security risk. The CSR was able to verify the authority on the account by talking to my customer using the usual methods.
In the case of a divorced couple, i have seen issues arise - however, the person who continues to pay (and be named on) the telecom bill should continue to have control over its email accounts. The one that doesnt should have their personal @xtra account closed or move it off the account before they loose authority.

Merging and moving email accounts should be a process that Telecom can handle because their customers merge and move other services when businesses start and close, people move house and others get divorced. I have had to assist many people in merging or moving their telecom accounts for business purposes - but had not yet had to deal with an email issue like this.

Ray Taylor

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plambrechtsen

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#725458 1-Dec-2012 12:25

raytaylor: Merging and moving email accounts should be a process that Telecom can handle because their customers merge and move other services when businesses start and close, people move house and others get divorced. I have had to assist many people in merging or moving their telecom accounts for business purposes - but had not yet had to deal with an email issue like this.

I can only agree with you. In my employers defence there is a whole myriad of complicated issues conspiring to make the management of primary email accounts onto a single account or moving sub-account email addresses between accounts not as smooth as it is with the vast majority of other experiences with Telecom.

It's something I am working on (as Principal Identity & Access Management Developer is my day job) but cannot say the timeframes when it's going to be fixed as the issue on a whole isn't a simple or quick one to fix, since if it was I would have already fixed it :).