Optus. One less customerI used to be a very happy Optus Mobile customer. We had a couple of mobile phones on a business account, and the landline was also with them. They had some good broadband plans as well and it almost made sense to bundle them.

But then the cold calling started. Drones who, though they were trying hard, really didn't understand much English outside their script; Enthusiastic Aussies who really thought they had the right product for me; and stone-walling supervisors who couldn't understand why I was upset about having maybe 8 calls in a week both during the work day and sometimes quite late into the evening.

I explained to the supervisors that repeated calls would do nothing but alienate me. They promised to update my records to have calls blocked.

I went into my local store and explained how annoyed I was with this continued harassment - while they had some sympathy there was nothing they could do, although they did connect me to their marketing administration people.

I patiently explained the problem, gave lots of details of my account and the numbers they were calling and they promised to opt us out.

I returned every bit of junk mail they sent with various "Please don't send junk mail" and "Not known at this address" messages.

Eventually the mail stopped, and the phone calls (after going through the above steps with the marketing admin people three times in total) also seemed to stop.

Then yesterday they could contain themselves no longer. Two calls from enthusiastic reps wanting to offer to tie me into a 24 month contract as a reward for being such a good client.

Turns out spammers aren't the only idiots. Optus telemarketing have finally driven me to action. If I wasn't going away for a couple of days I'd already have canceled our entire account. As it is their days are numbered. All because their CRM was too stupid (or too arrogant) to realise that when I said "don't call" I actually meant it!

 

Currently listening to: Red Snapper Image of You