SOME big corporations – Qantas, Telstra and the National Australia Bank – have infuriated me recently. But I am grateful for the experience.
More of why I am grateful for being driven almost to tears of frustration anon. First to the experiences.
I’ll take Qantas first because it was the most grievous.
Some moons ago my wife and I booked a frequent flyer trip Canberra-Sydney-Cairns and return. To be fair to Qantas, it has improved the chances of getting a frequent flyer flight from well nigh impossible a couple of years ago.
Anyway, the week before our flight my wife had to go to hospital in Sydney. She was due for discharge the day before the flight. As it happened, I had to be in Sydney the day before the flight anyway. So why not just abandon the Canberra-Sydney leg, join the flight in Sydney and fly to Cairns and return home when the holiday was over.
Oh no. That was far too simple for Qantas.
You cannot change a frequent flyer flight without incurring a penalty of 2500 points each.
But what difference is it to you, I pleaded. Indeed, you could resell those seats. What if we printed out boarding passes and joined the flight in Sydney?
No, you wouldn’t be allowed on the flight.
Have some humanity, I implored. My wife has been in hospital.
Well, was the response, she’ll need a medical certificate to say she is fit to fly.
It gets worse. Frequent flyer tickets must start and end in the same town. So we had to cancel the Sydney-Canberra return leg and buy two new tickets, which Qantas charged at the full rate.
You have to just cop it because on the power imbalance. Qantas knows you cannot boycott them, especially out of Canberra, because Qantas has the most convenient timetable.
Telstra. Why do I almost go into toxic shock every time I am compelled to go on to the Telstra la-la line. Sure it has improved from Rip van Winkle waiting times a year ago to the merely humiliating, but Telstra customers suffer from what I call Telstra’s bureaucratic compartmentalism. You cannot get one human being to deal with everything.
I was stupid enough to respond to a “bundling” flyer. It looked like it would save a lot, but if we were to do it my wife’s mobile number had to be changed because she was “on the old billing system”, as if this was a rational explan. That meant new business stationery and emails to all contacts. And I was told to ring another Telstra line to order my new mobile handset and told they were only available at Telstra retail outlets who rarely answer the phone and when they do insist you come in person to the store. So much for the digital economy.
Also, for some reason, a circle of about 400 metres around our place – just a couple of kilometres from Parliament House — is in a mobile black hole. Calls to Telstra get the response that their maps and technicians say the coverage is fine. I really pushed it once and finally got the response that Telstra acknowledges the coverage goes from one to zero bars but they were not going to do anything about it.
If I lived in the Bush I would be really put out compared to city dwellers.
The National Australia Bank. Right at the time they started their “More give, less take” advertising jingle, they did exactly the opposite. I had to refinance an investment property and even though the security was better and the loan was for only 50 per cent of value, they forced me on to a new loan with a higher interest rate and higher charges and would not renew the old loan on utterly spurious grounds I won’t bore you with.
I threatened to move banks along and convince as many family, friends and business partners as I could to do so too. They were immovable.
So I started to move banks. It would have been easier to move to Invercargill and about as pleasant. Peter Costello was dreaming when he provided this as the solution for customers being abused by banks. I’m still at it as I write.
Against these unresponsive monoliths you feel a sense of unfairness, powerlessness, and being abused.
So why am I grateful? Because as a WOW ‘EM – Well-Off While Educated Male — it is highly unusual for me to be in this state. Usually organisations, bureaucrats and others do not get the better of me. Throw in a bit of media savvy and media access and a bit of law and the fact I am 183cms tall means I am usually not among the downtrodden, discriminated against, ignored, abused or bullied.
But thanks to Qantas, Telstra and the NAB, I now have a small taste of that. Indeed, I have some sympathy for Kristy Fraser-Kirk who ran the sexual harassment case against David Jones. According to evidence in the court documents, her working life was made an unbearable misery because of the actions of people in power over her through no fault of her own.
And she was probably vilified in the lead up to the court action and certainly was afterwards. How dare the powerless stand up.
Now maybe the reported $850,000 compensation is too much, but the case has probably consumed a couple years of her life and she should be worth perhaps $200,000.
I’m lucky that the abuses of Qantas, Telstra and the NAB are remediable with a bit of time, money and effort. Moreover, they are not discriminatory – directed at women, gays, minorities, children, the disabled and the weak. Rather, large organisations seem to be completely INDISCRIMINATE about which of their customers they annoy, in the full knowledge that their near monopoly position means the abused customer usually has to come back, or if they don’t there are plenty more where they came from.
The evil of discrimination is that it engenders more than a mere sense of powerlessness, but also a sense of worthlessness. So well done Fraser-Kirk for not taking it. And mercifully we live in a society where discrimination is illegal.
In the meantime, customer abuse is perfectly legal. We have little choice but to put up with it. At least the WOW ‘EMs can be grateful it doesn’t happen in other aspects of their lives and they can appreciate the feelings of those to whom it does.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 30 October 2010.