Dear Optus…

For a company that does Internet, your online billing services.. well, how can I put this?
Oh, that’s right — they SUCK.
It’s taken me no less than three months to actually register to pay my mobile bill online. Despite the fact that, y’know, it’d be cheaper for you if I did. But every time I’ve tried before today, I’ve hit an error page letting me know that for unknown reasons, I couldn’t.
So I give it one last try today, what with having been told by a salesperson that my bill was due today. That’d be a salesperson, who, by the way, told me that she’d look into why I couldn’t register online, and get back to me within half an hour. That was three weeks ago. Quite why I believed her, when the last five reps said the same thing, is a mystery unto itself.
Also a mystery are your selling practices. I’m only on a postpaid plan as it was a stepping stone to getting a Blackberry service through Optus — except that you don’t offer a reasonable service to anyone actually bringing a Blackberry with them. Not that this stopped your store staff trying their best, signing me up to a post-paid (“because that must be why we can’t offer you month by month”) before giving up and telling me to call the service line. Y’know. The same lying sods who keep not getting back to me.
It should also be noted that this is the same phone company that allowed my wife’s phone number to be used to SMS China repeatedly, on her bill, but insisted that she must be doing it. Even when she’s on the SAME phone to customer service, and these mystery SMSes are going through to China, they’re apparently “her fault”, and she must be “lying” to customer service. That took me complaining long and loud (and, in the process, effectively socially engineering my way into her account) to get fixed. I think. I haven’t checked her account balance recently to see if we’re once again somehow SMSing China in our sleep.
Anyway, I digress. Tonight, just as my bill is due, the system lets me in. I register. Hurrah! The confirmation email is sent, so the system says… and I get it! Double Hurrah!
I log in..
I choose “Link account”, and then.. nothing. It turns out that unless I have a fourteen digit account number — and that’s the account number that OPTUS GAVE ME — I can’t, for some reason, link my account. Not that they could have told me that three months ago, or anything. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they didn’t actually want customers, or income, or profit or something.
Update: Yep, I’m sure they don’t. Actually trying to find out my balance — before, y’know, they cut off my mobile service — reveals that their enquiry service isn’t in fact open. So I can’t pay a bill where I don’t know the total accurately — I either have to guess and either underpay (and get cut off) or overpay (and, in effect, give them free money). Pure BLOODY GENIUS!! 
Sheesh. Any mobile phone companies out there actually looking for my business?

2 thoughts on “Dear Optus…”

  1. Everything that I ever hear about Optus is that they’re hopeless. It may be bad if Telstra controls the next-gen fibre network but somehow I think it will be worse under Optus…

  2. You could sign up to my service. Every second word is free, unless it’s a personal pronoun, in which case it gets charged at a pro-rata rate. Calls to friends are on a charge-every-third word rate, though excessive alliteration will see a penalty rate per word. Texting is 1c each, unless you use stupid abbreviations, at which point you get charged 0.523c per letter, not including spaces.
    So do you want to sign up for a 12 or 24 year plan?
    Christian

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