I was tempted to put this in the Telecom forum, because my current issue is a Telecom one (and who knows, someone here may know the answer), but on the other hand - it's become a rant about the difficulty in contacting real live people who can assist you these days. Every organisation has become faceless behind 0800 Voice Recognition Systems, web page forms etc and caters for the lowest common denominator in support.

Telecom Email Issue
I support a charity who use a Telecom ADSL connection with dynamic IP addressing, who have an SBS server and use smtp.xtra.co.nz as an SMTP Exchange "smart host", with Port 25 unblocked - which avoids the issue of having to worry too much about mail delivery issues.

They have recently received a number of delivery errors on outgoing email with "452 Too Many Recipients" errors, so I went to the Telecom web site to establish what the limit was. However, I couldn't find anything relevant there, or on the linked Yahoo!Xtra Help Pages. I decided to email xtrahelp@xtra.co.nz, in preference to camping on the phone for who knows how long and needing to explain myself many times over. However, I got an email back saying this mailbox had been closed and suggested a bunch of URLs, none of which were relevant - with a link to a web form to complete. This of course has the usual miniscule text box to type in (thank goodness for copy and paste) and when you click send, then presents the same bunch of URLs which you have to click past before it actually submits the query.

What an effort to ask a simple question.

Telstra Clear Issue
Recently a driver lost control of his car in our street, in the middle of the night and took out both a Telecom and a Telstra Clear cable junction box outside our house. While the Telstra Clear junction box was completely demolished, the cable appeared okay and I phoned the next morning to report this. An IVR of course, and I'm not a Telsta Clear customer - so to finally get to a real person to report the issue, while not having either a Telstra Clear Customer number or phone number, was buried about six levels deep.

At the time I wondered how people were supposed to cope in an emergency and I subsequently discovered on their web site, the statement: "Open 24 hours for emergency fault situations. When prompted by the automated voice to make a selection say TECHNICIAN". However, I had no internet access at that stage and was relying on the good old printed white pages. Given the state of mind of people ringing in a real emergency, wouldn't it be a good idea to state that somewhere within the voice menus?

Medical Practice
I phoned my elderly Dad's Doctor recently to inquire about the results of his eye test (I have power of attorney) to renew his driver's licence, as he was a little confused as to how things had gone -  and found myself confronted with an IVR system. This is not a large metropolitan practice, it's provincial North Island and needless to say there were no options to deal with my sort of query, so I selected "reception" and asked to speak to Dr xxxx's nurse. I was informed that I needed to speak to the telephone queue nurse as the others didn't deal with phone enquiries - "oh and you will need to ring back and select option 2, I can't put you through". "Ah, I'm on a toll call". "Sorry still can't put you through".

I honestly think that customer service for a lot of organisations has gone to the pack and in the name of $ savings - attempts to streamline customer service have actually become a complete barrier to delivering it.