Battles with big companies

So the drama of switching from Paradise to TelstraClear has been somewhat shifted to Genesis Energy, although entirely at the hand of TelstraClear.

Because TelstraClear stuffed up the lifetime redirect for my Paradise email to my Clear mail box a power bill from Genesis Energy did indeed bounce back to Genesis. Being true to my word, I got back on Twitter and expressed my displeasure at this, directed at TelstraClear. They were most apologetic and made up for me being out of pocket by sending me some vouchers to put towards my TelstraClear bill – nice of them, but I have yet to figure out how to see and pay my Clear email bill because every time I ask them to send me the forms to pay by credit card, they send me direct debit forms …

However, I digress. Back to paying my Genesis bill – also want to pay this with new credit card to get airpoints so was pleased to see how easy it was to find and submit a credit card payment off their site. But. Amount X is due if the bill is paid by 11 August and Amount Y is due if paid after. Clearly I have to pay Amount Y with it being the 14th, in fact the site has big flashing “OVERDUE. PLEASE PAY IMMEDIATELY” all over it. So, click the ‘Pay Now’ button and I’m only offered the choice of paying Amount X. What? I want to pay the full amount and they won’t let me? I paid the smaller Amount X, thinking it would leave the difference on my bill so I could just use ‘Pay Now’ again to pay off the bill. No. ‘Pay Now’ button has gone. I’m dubious that this amount is going to stay on our account as an overdue amount and will not be included in what’s on offer via the ‘Pay Now’ button next month, so I’ve had to pay the little extra bit via online banking.

Boy oh boy I am getting SO frustrated with all this. TelstraClear has been pretty good, the guys manning the Twitter account very patient with me but generally the websites for these big companies SUCK. The Genesis FAQ page is erroring today, the TelstraClear site for adding alisases to my email address keeps looping back to an ‘Account Summary’ page … The other day I gave up on the TelstraClear website and phoned their 0800 number to find out about paying by credit card. The automated voice system said “I can understand most of your commands. Tell me what you want from the following options. You can interrupt me any time.” One of the options offered was ‘Your account’, so I said ‘My account’ (thinking she was addressing me) but she ignored me, so I tried ‘Your account’ … that didn’t work either. So I hung up on her and tried again. This time interrupting – not sure how many times I shouted ‘My account’ before the voice switched to an ad that said you could now pay by credit card by selecting Customer Zone on the website, so I hung up again! GRRRR!

1 comment so far ↓

#1 Emanuel on 08.19.10 at 6:39 pm

GRRR indeed! Have you ever tried just shouting random gibberish at the automated voice system to see where it’d take you? The Telecom one gives-up after a few tries and passes you off to a Real Person. Maybe you can be just as lucky with Genesis’ one.

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