commentary Reading over the results from the Australian Broadband Survey for 2004 confirms what many ZDNet Australia readers have written about over the past year: Telstra drastically needs to improve its BigPond service.
The survey, conducted by Whirlpool, polled 13,000 Australian Internet users to get a picture of the current broadband marketplace, including their views on ISP customer service and reliability.
A sign that the overall market has improved is that 72.5 percent of respondents felt they are getting better value than a year ago. However, while some ISPs seemed to perform exceptionally well, others -- by and large Telstra -- received dismal results.
Customer service stands out as the area where Telstra falls most behind, with 43.8 percent of BigPond users in the survey saying it is 'average' and 22.7 percent describing it 'awful'. The only ISP to score lower was TPG -- 70 percent of respondents said its customer service fell under these categories.
In contrast, 98.5 percent of WestNet and 95.9 percent of Internode respondents gave their ISPs a customer service rating of 'good' or 'excellent'.
With regard to reliability, Internode and WestNet again ranked the highest while BigPond hit the bottom of the pile.
With all these very sub-par ratings it's no wonder that when asked if respondents would recommend their ISP to others, BigPond scored the lowest.
Not surprisingly, a spokesperson for Telstra criticised the survey, saying it was unrepresentative of the Australian Internet population.
Arguably, this is true. In the demographics section of the questionnaire, almost 80 percent of respondents described themselves as power users or technical gurus.
But aren't these people also Telstra's target market? Even if they are not, should the average user be content with an Internet service that the tech savvy community of Australia has deemed to be of very low standard in terms of customer service and reliability?
What do you think? Talk back to me below!.
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While I probably agree to some extent with the results of Whirlpool’s survey, I do have some comments to make:
1. I was a Telstra ADSL customer for years – practically from the start of when Telstra made ADSL available. In the early days, the service was fairly unreliable, but by the end (I switched to Internode at the beginning of this year) I had no problems with the service at all. I never had a problem with their tech support (though in the last couple of years I’ve never had to call them). I switched to Internode purely for the price, and additional options like web space and multiple e-mail addresses.
2. The whole culture at Whirlpool tends to be very anti-Telstra. Most likely not the fault of the people who run the site, but it certainly is “hip to be anti-Telstra” and very uncool to be pro-Telstra in postings at Whirlpool. Based on this alone I wasn’t surprised when I first read that Telstra was canned in the survey. So I think Telstra’s claim that the survey was not representative of Australian broadband users may hold a grain of truth.
So the question is – why is the culture at Whirlpool so anti-Telstra? I suspect Telstra’s bad early days have a lot to do with it. Also, they’re seen as the big bad guys (perhaps rightly so) – perhaps the survey results have more to do with the average Whirlpool member’s view of Telstra as a company than with the actual service Telstra provides.