My first stab at this was going on too long. The short set-up to the story is this: we switched to Telus from Shaw at home (phone, tv and internet) and my wife contracted with Telus to put a phone and internet in her new business.
The home install went okay, except Telus did not activate my voice mail for my business line. We called, got through 3 times (couldn’t wait for two other calls – each one we had waited for an hour) and the result was: no voice mail.
I tweeted Telus Support (@telussupport) and within ten minutes I got a message that it was activated… and it was!
There were big problems with getting hooked up at my wife’s business. It took five appointments, two no shows, a technician who didn’t know how to do what we needed, but finally a technician who knew what he was doing. It was complicated and it took him/Telus about three days to get us hooked up. During those three days there was no communication to us initiated by Telus.
By now we were frustrated. Remember, we are NEW clients. I tweeted several times to Telus Business and ended up in an email exchange with a fellow named “G”. He apologised, took full responsibility, and revised our contract at 40% below what we were paying. Twittering worked again.
Unfortunately, my wife’s Internet didn’t work. She tried calling three times, each time waited for close to an hour and then had to go.
I tweeted about that to Telus Support and within 15 minutes had a user name and password. It didn’t work. But my wife called a different Telus number I had found and the technician fixed it right away. Problem was when “G” gave us the new contract, it reset everything, including the user name and password.
The main message here is not Telus bashing, but rather through no more than 8 tweets (each one no more than 140 characters), we got done what we couldn’t calling Telus on the phone. We spent hours and hours on the phone. I spent 10 minutes tweeting.
It is ironic that a telecommunications company can’t answer its phones. But kudos to Telus for being on Twitter where customer issues and complaints are transparent. My tweets were visible to everyone else. And kudos for the speed by which their Twitter system worked.
So, this is a twitter success story and perhaps raises a few questions about customer service that Telus might wish to think about.
