Telstra has not been clear about third party content charges, and so the ACCC has launched federal court action. In a nutshell:
You’d have to think someone in Telstra will get a reduced bonus this year, but sadly it usually seems to work the other way around.
Maybe they received increased bonus when the overcharging occurred as they met their performance KPIs for premium billing services. They possibly won’t get the bonus this year, but it may have already been paid prior to this becoming public.
Maybe organisations need to include in the workplace agreements ability to recover of past bonuses (of all personnel from CEOs to operational staff), when such bonuses were based on illegal or unreasonable/unconscionable actions.
A reflection of a corporate culture rather than a service culture perhaps.
“Let’s do this as it will make us more money” rather than “How do we improve our service for our customers”. One could argue that the second response would bring more customers and therefore more income and hopefully more profit, while the first produces bad headlines, likely court appearances, and a good possibility of loss of money and customers.
The thought patterns in these businesses need to change so that customer care really means caring about customers.
ACCC been chewing on the teething rusk?
The ACCC is on a roll. Do we detect an election coming?
More from the ACCC on PDB …
Optus got an invite to the party !
Pretty soon all these fines might equal a decent (past and protective) political donation with the message received not being to shape up, just donate more.
Optus has once again been fined for their “modus operandi” of deceptive and misleading conduct by the Federal Court.following the outcome of yet another case brought on by the ACCC.
Hopefully all their customers who were ripped off by this con job will jump on the bandwagon so as to get their money refunded.
As a person said many decades ago, “You can sell s**t wrapped up in silver paper but you just have to use the right story”.
Perhaps they lost their script?
The Federal Court has once again fined Optus for their ongoing misleading and deceptive conduct following another action brought by the ACCC, this time for $10 million.
26% !!
It would be interesting to see the message Telstra sent. It is implied it was something like “you can be refunded $XX if you click here or SMS ‘YES’.”
It is more probable the Telstra message was not quite so straight forward and included text about no further action, end of your rights for this matter, and so on legalese. Does anyone have a copy of one?
If more than a click or SMS and the amount due was say $0.55, it could be pure lazy.
One has to wonder why Telstra did not simply automatically pay the refunds instead of apparently requiring the customers to request it, except for any whom Telstra did not have account or address details for.
Not sure that this is a good idea. It moves some of the financial risk of bad behaviour from the company to the employees i.e. as such is a financial incentive for the company.
How about: The ACCC can go after individual employees who are carrying out bad behaviour in addition to going after the company itself? That way there is an incentive for an employee to say “no” and stop something bad before it ever happens (rather than cases like this where the courts get to clean up the mess after the event).
Maybe they sent email wherever possible and ensured that the email went into the spam folder (which is exactly the kind of thing that should happen with such an email i.e. it would look very spammy).
No, one can imagine exactly why Telstra did not pay the refunds automatically.
